Sun-Dried Tomato Chicken Pasta

Tried a new recipe last night for dinner using the remaining leftover chicken from the roaster I made late last week - a light pasta in a "cream" sauce. I thought I would share the recipe because it was scrumptious and Christopher gave his thumbs up to it! Note - I used unsweetened almond milk instead of a cream. You can substitute what you like here and with most of the other ingredients. 

Sun-Dried Tomato Chicken Pasta

Serves 4

3 garlic cloves, minced

1 small jar sun-dried tomatoes, sliced into smaller pieces

1 lb cooked chicken, diced or shredded

salt

paprika

1 cup unsweetened almond milk

1 cup shredded mozzarella

8 oz penne pasta

1 tbsp dry basil

1/4 tsp crushed red pepper

In a large pan on high heat, saute garlic and sun-dried tomatoes for about 1 minute. Add in the cooked chicken, lightly salted and add a little bit of paprika (or a lot depending on your taste). Add the almond milk and mozzarella and lower heat to a simmer. Stir the sauce to ensure all of the cheese and ingredients have melted and blended. 

Cook pasta according to the pasta instructions. (Side note: I reserve a little bit of the pasta water in the event the sauce becomes too thick and needs to be thinned). Add the cooked pasta to the skillet and stir to combine. Add 1 tbsp of basil and the red pepper flakes. Stir to combine. At this point, if the sauce is too thick, add a little bit of the reserved pasta water. Just a little at a time until you reach the desired consistency. Simmer for a couple of minutes to let the flavors combine and enjoy!

Easy Super Bowl Treats

My two favorite things about Super Bowl Sunday - 1) Indulging on lots of food that is so good (but so bad for your hips and 2) All the entertainment and hoopla before, during and after the game. I am so excited to see Katy Perry perform at half time - I think she will put on a great show. I LOVED Bruno Mars last year - he was so good. Plus who doesn't get into the TV commercials??

Back to my first favorite thing about Super Bowl Sunday - THE FOOD. We are going to make homemade baked chicken wings. Now I know what you are all thinking - that sounds so lame, why not get take out wings that are delicious and fried up? Trust me - our homemade wings are just as tasty (if not BETTER) and we char-grill them at the end for that extra little char flavor. MMM - I am hungry just thinking about them.

Then my in-laws are ordering pizza and we are still thinking of other appetizer ideas. So I turned to my friend Pinterest to find some simple app recipes. Pictures are included below - I hope to be inspired soon!

Football Strawberries. I did something similar three years ago for a friends party. Chocolate covered strawberries are always a hit. 

Have your grill handy? (You will need it for our chicken wings!) How simple and tasty are these kabobs - slices of ham with pineapple

Baked Mozzarella and basil bites - a little bit healthier approach to traditional mozzarella sticks. Fresh mozzarella and basil leaf enclosed in a wonton wrapper and baked. 

Pepperoni bites with fresh mozzarella in the middle. A nice carb-free option instead of pizza

Included below is the recipe for our AWESOME baked chicken wings. Here is also a link to one of my other favorite and easy appetizers - Firecracker Chicken Roll-ups.

Crispy Baked Chicken Wings
4 lbs chicken wings (I usually get Free Bird Party wings - they are already halved at the joints)
2 Tbsp Baking Powder
3/4 tsp salt
Whatever sauce you like (We like Rufus Teague)

Adjust oven racks to upper-middle and lower-middle positions and preheat to 250 degrees. Set wire rack in aluminum foil-lined rimmed baking sheet and spray the rack with a non-stick spray. Pat wings dry and transfer to a gallon size plastic zip lock bag. Combine the baking powder and salt and add to the bag with the wings. Close the bag and shake to coat as evenly as possible.

Arrange the wings skin side up in a single layer on the sprayed rack. Bake wings on the lower-middle oven rack for 30 minutes. Move wings to the upper-middle rack, increase oven temperature to 425 degrees and roast until wings are golden brown and crisp - about 40 minutes longer, rotating sheet halfway through baking. Remove the sheet from oven and let stand for 5 minutes. While the wings are resting, fire up the grill to medium-high heat. Transfer the cooked wings to a bowl and cover those bad boys with your sauce of choice. Toss to coat. Bring the bowl to the grill and char the wings on each side for about 1 minute per side. Enjoy them while they are hot!

Cute Valentine's Day Ideas

I can't believe February will be here next week! With that said, Christopher and I have not finalized any plans yet. But I have been enjoying all of the fun Valentine's Day treats, gifts, etc on Pinterest. I thought I would share a few of my favorites.

Isn't this the cutest card? So simple too!

Fun treat for school or office. Simple too (getting a theme here?)

Adorable and easy decoration for the home

Another cute and yummy V-Day Snack

Fun Weekend

This past weekend was so much fun! Friday night I got to visit with the Umstead twins for a little bit. They are such cuties and recently celebrated their 1st birthday! After visiting with them, I got to see one of my other favorite cuties Molly! And BONUS - girls night with Christine. It was so great catching up and watching some chick flicks. Looking forward to our next date.

Then on Saturday Christopher and I drove out to Rochester to visit with the Simm family and finally meet little Emma. We had so much fun too. We celebrated Christmas and Jack's 2nd birthday. He was super excited to play with his new tool bench.

Dennis and Anna are also doing well. It was great to catch up with them too. We are so blessed to have great friends in our life!

Whole Chicken in the Crock Pot

This came out of the crock pot - who knew!

This week I feel like Christopher and I are running in two different directions. We try very hard to sit down together for dinner, but sometimes that is hard because we have meetings after work. Yesterday, I was the one who had the event at 6 pm but I still wanted to squeeze in dinner together before I left.

I bought a whole roasting chicken to have this week and decided to try it in the crock pot (my NEW crock pot - so excited to use it). It came out great! I thought it would be too soft and not flavorful, but that was not the case! I highly recommend saving time and cooking it this way. I did a lemon-garlic seasoning that worked well. This is what I did:

Inside the crock pot, I made a "bed" for the chicken to lay on of a sliced onion, carrots and celery. Then I took the washed and patted dry chicken and laid it inside the crock pot. I then sliced a lemon and three garlic cloves and threw them inside the chicken. On the outside of the chicken, I seasoned with salt, pepper and my handy lemon-garlic seasoning. That is it! I set my crock pot on low for 8 hours.

When it was time to eat, I took the chicken out (carefully) and placed it in a roasting pan. Then turned my oven onto broil and broiled the chicken for about 5-7 minutes so the skin could brown and crisp up. This worked perfectly to give the chicken the roasted look.

Bonus for creating the "bed" of veggies is that it propped up the chicken and all of the juices from the chicken collected in the bottom. BONUS - now I have the broth I need to make chicken noodle soup with the cooked veggies.

We enjoyed our chicken with leftover potatoes and veggies from the previous nights meal. I was able to come home and eat dinner within 25 minutes before turning around for my event.

BONUS - I now have the base for my chicken soup!

Our Disney December Trip - Day 6 (Last Day)

Our last day in the Kingdom :( Christopher made breakfast reservations at the Grand Floridian Cafe for breakfast so he could get in his last steak and eggs there. He is STILL talking about breakfast there and I will have to get on it to make breakfast reservations for our May trip. 

With excellent planning of our trip, we were able to snag Fast Passes to meet Elsa & Anna!!! It was an awesome experience to meet them. They spent a good amount of time with each party and posed for lots of pictures and signed our picture mat.

We also got on some of our favorite rides too - like Space Mountain and Pirates of the Caribbean.

We were sad to go! But we know we will be back in less than 5 months!

Our Disney December Trip - Day 5

Day 5 of our trip, we did a "resort" tour to catch a bunch of the Christmas decorations and exhibits that were up. We decided to take the monorail to Epcot and then walk through Epcot to get to the Crescent Lake resort area. I tried to tempt Christopher with a cronut, but he was being good. 

Our first stop was Beach Club. It was a lovely warm day and by the time we got to the resort area - no jackets were necessary!

Inside the Beach Club, they had many decorated Christmas trees and a lifesize carousel made out of gingerbread! It was even spinning too!

We then walked over to the Yacht Club. This resort also had a lot of Christmas trees decorated, but their centerpiece was a model train village. It was huge and beautiful. This inspired Christopher to set up our train sets when we got home from the trip. 

Then we walked over to the Boardwalk Resort - one of our favorite resorts (and staying here in May!) The poinsettia garden was beautiful! Wish it was warm enough in Buffalo to do this.

Inside the Boardwalk Resort they had a classic stand for some cones! Made out of...you guessed it - Gingerbread!

We then took a bus over to the Magic Kingdom and walked to the Contemporary resort. Their gingerbread exhibit was themed for Frozen. And instead of Hidden Mickeys - they did Hidden Olaf's - how cute!

We then took to the monorail over to the Poly to relax and catch some football. Unfortunately they did not show the Buffalo Bills game. But we still sat at the bar - ordered our Lapu Lapu's and Christopher received play by play updates through his dad, brother Mike, friends and ESPN.

After relaxing and finishing our drinks at the Poly, we headed back to our home resort and grabbed lunch out on the beach/pool area. Christopher was in a good mood, despite missing the Bills game.

We then headed back to our rooms to change for dinner! Our last night, we did dinner at Citricos inside the Grand. Before dinner, we got some more pictures in front of the HUGE tree inside the Grand, did a little last minute shopping and then headed to the lounge for some pre-dinner drinks. 

We relaxed at the lounge and listened to the live band that was playing. It was truly an exception experience and we will definitely be doing that again. (Side note: you are warned - service at the lounge is very slow).

Citricos is our new favorite restaurant! The service is incredible and the food is absolutely out of this world. We ordered a bottle of wine and started with some appetizers. Christopher ordered the arancini and I had the cheese course. For our entrees Christopher had the Swordfish and I had the veal chop. Both were AMAZING and I still think about that meal.

Although we really did not have any room left for dessert, I wanted to get the warm chocolate torte just so I could get the chocolate crown. Our table was near the dessert station and I caught the pastry chefs making the crowns while we were there.

Christopher ordered the gelato sampler - and it was so cute. They served it in three mini ice cream cones in this cute stand.

We then ran down to the dock after dinner (more like waddled) to catch Wishes over Magic Kingdom. It was so romantic and a great way to end our Christmas vacation at Disney. 

Middle of January Already?

I can't believe it is the middle of January ALREADY!!! Work for me has been super busy with year-end, PwC audit, export metrics and my SOX testing due - all at once.

Christopher is enjoying his new job at Nativity Miguel School and has started a "bow tie Friday" trend. I got together with one of my close friends and found out she is EXPECTING!!! Baby Urban coming July 1st! I can't wait to be an aunt again!

Christopher's brother Chet gave us his Bandits tickets while he and the family were out of town - Thanks Chet! We had a wonderful time and got to see the Bandits start their season with a win.

Little Jameson had his neuter performed. He is doing fine and was back to his normal self in...two hours. Seriously. He is resilient and was playing, eating and bugging Marv within a few hours of being home.

The rest of the month is busy and exciting for us too. We have our friends wedding "reception" party to attend. They were married the same weekend as Dave & Abby, but in Jamaica, so their family is throwing them a little party here. We have networking events, board meetings. I am looking forward to a date night with Christine!!! Woo hooo! And we are squeezing in a visit with the Simm Family in Rochester. Looking forward to meeting baby Emma!

Our Disney December Trip - Day 4

The BIG Kahuna

AND KONA COFFEE (all CAPS because I am so excited seeing this food)

TONGA TOAST

Day 4. We started the day off with a hearty breakfast at the Polynesian Resort's Kona Cafe. I had the Tonga Toast and Christopher ordered the huge breakfast platter. We then relaxed for a bit and headed over to Hollywood Studios in the afternoon.

Gorgeous sunny day at the Grand

Like all of the other resorts and park, this one was decorated for Christmas too.

We rode Star Tours, Toy Story Midway Mania and even caught an Indiana Jones show.

We decided to have a snack before heading over to the Osborne Family Spectacle of Lights and picked Min & Bills Diner. Neither of us had eaten here before and there choices sounded delicous.

We split a Buffalo Chicken Mac & Cheese and a Pretzel hot dog. Both were delicious.

Christopher, who isn't even a cheese fan like me, still talks about the mac & cheese! I should add that to the recipe list!

We found a good spot to wait for the show to start. And little did we know how great our spot was - it was right in front of the light switch! It was really cool to watch the selected family flip the switch and turn on all of the lights!

Although I posted some pictures here, none of them really do the show justice.

What happens in the show, is the lights will twinkle and dance for special, selected Christmas songs and then once the song is over, the lights will not flash/twinkle/dance. It is truly a spectacle to see.

After the show, we left Hollywood Studios and headed to Downtown Disney for shopping, walking around and to grab a late dinner. All the shops were decked out for Christmas too. We got to go into the new Disney Marketplace Co-op and Christopher has special cigars rolled for him at Sosa's.

We sat down and had dinner at Wolfgang Puck's Express. It was a great way to relax and unwind.