Creamy Chicken Enchiladas

I love Mexican food. Anytime I get extremely hungry, that's what I crave. We like this recipe for enchiladas and we both agree that it's even better the second day!

Ingredients:

1 can 98% fat free cream of chicken soup

8 oz fat free sour cream

1 cup salsa

2 tsp chili powder

2 cups cubed, cooked chicken (you can make this super easy by using canned chicken, but we like to use the cooked chicken)

2 cups shredded, Mexican blend cheese

8 (ish) tortillas

Mix soup, sour cream, salsa and chili powder together in bowl. Put 1 cup of mixture in separate bowl, mix with 1 cup cheese and the chicken. Spread a thin layer of the chicken-less mixture on the bottom of a 9x13 pan.

Spoon about 1/4 cup of chicken mixture in each tortilla, rolling them and placing them seam-side down in the pan.

After you have put as many as will fit in the pan, cover with the rest of the plain mixture and top with remaining cheese.

Bake at 350 for 40 minutes. If you aren't a fan of the sour cream mixture for the topping, you can use a can of red enchilada sauce to cover them, then top with cheese. We like ours creamy though! And this is really bad, but I don't have a completed "after" picture!!

Birthday pictures!

These are backwards because blogger has decided to not allow me to move pictures around in a post. But here they are! Tim wanted a birthday pie instead of a birthday cake. Perhaps it is because he knows how horrible of a decorator I am! He saved me the frustration!

Happy Birthday to Tim!

Today is my wonderful husband's birthday! He turned 25 and we went out to eat at one of his favorite restaurants, Outback, then went and picked up his birthday present. He got a new camera! It is really nice and takes amazing pictures. I'm going to try to steal it every now and then! Check back later for birthday pictures!!

"Oh my gosh, where have you been?!"

Here:

I've been working evenings on a project for the doctor I work for. He has decided to make the transition over to electronic prescriptions, so I found the software, have been adding about 1500 patients, and going completely crosseyed doing it! Tim went ahead and put in his top 40 or so prescriptions and saved them as favorites so all the doctor has to do is select the medication and the sigs are already on there and he just has to attach it to a patient and there you go!

While I've been camped out, with pen in mouth and computer in lap, I have had some company:

They looked like that until they saw this:

Whenever it rains, the entire front of our house is covered in snails and some of them find there way onto our front door (you might need to click on the picture to enlarge it to see them):

Two things to note about this picture: those nose prints happen within 5 minutes of anytime I clean the door and Annie is apparently winking at you!

I know all 5 of you were worried about where I was for the past week, but worry no more, I am back! You should hear more from me this week!!

Annie Update

Annie is doing great! She is not having any issues with her back legs anymore and she is becoming harder to control jumping off of things and coming up stairs. She's good about not jumping up on the bed or the couch, she just waits for us to pick her up. We've been letting her go outside in the backyard. We walk her down the stairs and then let her walk around a bit more than we were when we would take her out in the front. We really are not restricting her much other than making sure she doesn't jump. We try our hardest not to let her jump down but sometimes we just don't catch her in time. She IS a dachshund!!

Here are some pictures of our little girl and how well she is healing!

Leo has been feeling left out, since I haven't blogged about him for a while! Here is a picture of him enjoying the new living room setup!

And here is a picture of him from a few weeks ago that I thought was so cute!

Oh my!

Can you see that? It says 127 degrees! It wasn't really that hot, my car was just sitting in the sun. I thought it was funny though!

One thing led to another...

Tim and I had to go up to my office today to get some things done. The doctor I work for has decided he wants to start using electronic prescriptions, so he needs a computer set up at his work station so he can access the program quickly in between patients. Tim set up the internet connection and got the computer fixed up for him. I should get the program up and running this week so next weekend we will add all the prescription info into it so it's quick and easy for the doctor to use. Also while we were up there, I took my portable shampooer/deep cleaner and cleaned all the chairs in the lobby. I swear, I don't think those cushions had been cleaned since the doctor bought them 30+ years ago. It was disgusting. When I poured out the dirty water, it was black. I couldn't see through it! Gross gross gross!

Anyways, when we got home, I thought since I had it out, I would clean our couch. So I pulled our couch out away from the wall and cleaned the cushions. That lead to me cleaning everything from behind the couch, which lead me to cleaning behind the recliner and the loveseat. Well, while I had all the furniture pulled away from their usual places, I decided to rearrange the furniture! I also ended up mopping all the floors...there is a downside to hardwood floors, you have to mop the entire house! But here are the pictures of our new living room.

We really like the fact that you can see the TV from any of the seating options (since our lives revolve around tv!), because before you could only see it from the big couch. We would have to move the loveseat over anytime we had company and we all wanted to watch a movie!

Addition to the Baked Ziti

Tim doesn't consider a meal a meal unless it has some kind of meat in it, so I usually brown some ground turkey or ground beef and mix into my sauce before I add it to the cheese mixture. It makes the meal a bit more substantial and keeps my man happy! :-)

Baked Ziti

How about a non-sweet recipe? I promise I make things other than desserts!!

Baked Ziti

-16 oz ricotta cheese (I use fat free)
-2 cups low fat mozzarella cheese
-1 egg
-32 oz pasta sauce (sometimes I'm quite the Suzy Homemaker and make mine from scratch, other times I buy it in the jar)
-ziti, penne, or rigatoni noodles
-Parmesan cheese

Cook pasta according to directions. Mix ricotta, mozzarella, egg and pasta sauce together in large bowl (really larger or you'll have noodles flying everywhere later in the recipe!). Drain noodles and add to the mixture. Pour everything into a 9x13 pan and top with desired amount of Parmesan cheese. Bake at 350 for 30-45 minutes until cheese has browned.

I don't have a picture because, just imagine cheesy, noodley goodness!

Buttermilk Chess Pie...mmmmm

This is one of Tim's favorites! I make it easy by using the roll out pie crusts. I have made my own pie crusts but I don't want the daunting task of making homemade pie crust to keep me from making a pie, so I keep the roll out ones on hand. It is a custard style pie, so don't be turned off by the consistency. I bake these in twos. I am ashamed to say that Tim and I have eaten one whole pie in one sitting, it's that good!

Ingredients:

9 inch unbaked pie crust

2 cups white sugar

2 tablespoons flour

5 eggs

2/3 cup buttermilk

1/2 cup melted butter

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 teaspoon lemon extract (optional)

-Preheat oven to 350. Press crust in pie pan and flute edges (I'm not a professional fluter, I just use both of my thumbs, but I think you are supposed to use a thumb and forefinger. Maybe one day I will master the art of fluting).

-In a large bowl (I use my KitchenAid), combine sugar and flower. Add eggs all at once, mix. Add buttermilk, mix until blended. Add vanilla (and lemon if desired) to melted butter. Stir into mix. Pour filling into the pie crust.

-Bake for about 45 minutes or until filling is set. I usually start out baking it for 35 minutes, then jiggle it. If it doesn't seem quite set enough, I bake it the additional 10 minutes. It will not ever not jiggle, it just doesn't need to be really loose. Does that make sense or do I need to quit my moonlighting job as a recipe writer??

Here is a picture of the finished product:

As you can see, my fluting leaves much to be desired!

Now, go get in your huge kitchens and whip one (or two) of these up!

Do you have a small kitchen?

You can ask Tim, I get so frustrated when people talk about their "small kitchen". Usually it means they don't have an island, or have a narrow layout. I laugh when people on House Hunters, Property Virgins, or My First Place (can you tell which channel I watch the most?!) talk about their tiny kitchen, then they show it and it's about 3 times the size of ours now! I just want to share with you what my kitchen looks like when I'm baking.

First, here is the area around my KitchenAid. I am currently making a pie that only requires 6 ingredients, yet, as you can see, I have no room to set anything. Things are stacked on top of things and I'm using my burner to set my egg carton (which is not smart when your oven is preheating, as it melts the styrofoam to the remaining eggs!!):

To give you some perspective, here is the rest of that counterspace area:

Now this is not what my kitchen normally looks like, it only looks this way when I am in the middle of cooking or baking something, but that is when I need the most counterspace, obviously.

How do I manage, you ask? Oh, well there's a whole other side to the kitchen with counterspace I haven't shown you yet:

What would I do without that extra 6 inches of counterspace? Also, I store my pans in the oven because of a lack of cabinet space, so whenever I have to use the oven, my washing machine lid doubles as storage space! If the dryer wasn't angled down the way it is, I would actually be able to utilize that area as extra work space.

Please, feel sorry for me! Or, if you have a smaller kitchen, please send me pictures!! :-)

Wild Olive Tees

Check out the button I added to the left. I have ordered a couple of shirts from www.WildOliveTees.com and love them! They are very cute and comfortable. I often receive comments/compliments when I wear mine. Now they are coming out with a kids line of tees that I think are great! If you have little ones, you should check it out. If you don't, you should check it out for yourself!!

Guess who got her staples out!

I bet you had no idea!

She is doing so great! She is off all meds and is FINALLY (as of last night) sleeping at night. She has been keeping us up for the past week whining and needing to go to the bathroom every 1-2 hours. I didn't know how much longer we could take of that. The lack of sleep was causing us to be a bit on edge and bicker quite a bit. I'm ready for a new start to this week, with lots of sleep! We are letting her walk freely around the house. We still just taker her out front to do her business then bring her right in. I'm worried the temptation of chasing squirrels will be too much for her if we let her out back! We are helping her get up and down the bed and couches. This week we will be starting her physical therapy. We have to call the office in Dallas to find out what exactly we are supposed to be doing. Her left back leg still isn't 100%, but our vet seems to think that it will get back to normal over time. I hope he's right!

We've decided we are going to get a set of these:

Tim's mom found a set at Bed, Bath and Beyond that is portable so we would be able to take it from room to room to use it for the bed or the couch and we could also take it with us when we travel with her. Hopefully we will be getting the steps this week. I imagine it will take her some time to figure out that she is supposed to walk up and down them rather than just soar off the side of the bed!!