i learned 2 major things from attempting this week’s meal- 1. try to follow the recipe. if they say melt the cheese, THEN add in other mixture, there’s probably a reason for it, and 2. cheese sauce is hard to make.
for this week’s meal I chose to do a kraft cooking with philly recipe! “Creamy PHILLY pesto chicken”, with baked green beans. Again, not a lot of ingredients, not a huge cook time, so it looked pretty easy. and essentially it was.
http://www.cookingwithphilly.ca/philadelphia2/page?PagecRef=609&currpage=1&rid=15948
you take your chicken, and you cook it up in a frying pan until done. easy.
next you are supposed to take the cream cheese and cook it on medium heat until melted. surprisingly enough, it takes a little while for it to actually melt. first it got kind of gloopy, and it stuck to my spoon quite a bit. i got tired of waiting for the cream cheese to melt, so i threw in the next ingredients right away. and so the not following the recipe begins.
i added the pesto, and broth all together with the clumpy cheese, and stirred. i stopped stirring a couple of times to talk to matt, and to take pictures, and realized i should have been whisking instead of stirring. does it make a difference i wondered? who knows. i do know however, that it wasn’t really a sauce as much as it was a clumpy stew-like mess. realizing it wasn’t really as saucy as it should be, i added more broth. did that help? not really. it evaporated pretty quickly…and i swear i had it on low- not even medium!
anyways, let’s talk about the green beans. they were super easy. like really really easy. and for this, i didn’t follow a recipe at all, i just threw them in a dish, put some oil on them, seasoning, lemon juice, then baked them for a half hour or so. they turned out really good. oh, i also sprinkled some bread crumbs on the top hoping to add a bit of a crunchy crust, but i didn’t put enough on it. they turned out really well anyways!
so, chicken with clumpy cheese topping, and baked green beans in oil, seasoning and lemon juice. great tuesday meal if i do say so myself! 🙂
whisk count for tuesday/monday meals: 2 recipes so far! 😛 (that count is for you lyndsay!)
and don’t worry laura- i haven’t forgotten about the recipe you sent me! can’t wait to try it!