Chicken Cordon Bleu

I was working at church today and found out when I got home that my husband, who loves to cook, had cooked Chicken Cordon Bleu with my two girls. They told me all about pounding the meat with a pan and putting toothpicks in it. I gave a little taste and yum! Good job, everybody!

Here's a link to the recipe they used and some pictures of the finished dish!

Easy Bake

Anyone, remember this contraption? The Easy Bake oven - the stuff dreams are made of for little girls; the nemesis of Mom's everywhere.

Katie LOVES to cook; actually, Katie LOVES anything to do with food. She faithfully watches the Food Network with her Dad and me and just a few nights ago told me that she would "try" the caramel apple with meal worms on it - a feature on a Halloween Food Network special. I believe she would try anything once; she's brave like her Daddy. I digress...

Anyway, Katie got the idea in her mind to break out the Easy Bake oven. We haven't done it for years. I balk at the idea of cooking a nasty tasting mix by a 100 watt bulb, especially one that costs $5.74. However, for the love of my children, I went back in my memory to recall the thrill of cooking in my own Easy Bake Oven. Being interpreted: I caved! I tried to talk her into "real baking" (Betty Crocker mix), but she would have none of it. So this past weekend, we gave it a go.

Here's the girl's sweet delights:

Yellow Cake with white frosting, ribboned in pink

Chocolate Cake with Pink Frosting, decorated with sprinkles

Do-It-Yourself Teppanyaki

On May 9th I shared a Fried Rice Recipe with you that included an amazing sauce. Many years ago, our dear friends, the Valenzuela's, had us for dinner and served us a Japanese meal that centered around food cooked on a griddle in the middle of the table. It was accompanied by The Sauce. Here's the recipe and pictures of us sharing the meal with my in-laws.

The Sauce

Ingredients:

½ C soy sauce
½” of ginger, sliced
¼ C water
1 t. sesame seeds
½ C brown sugar
2-3 cloves garlic, crushed
2 drops Tabasco

Boil these ingredients for 1 min., then strain and serve as a dipping sauce. (Can be doubled.) Serve with white rice.

Heat a griddle and spread with margarine. Cook cook raw beef, skinless chicken breast, scallops, shrimp, Napa cabbage, bean sprouts, onions, mushrooms, zucchini, Chinese eggplant and peppers.

Recipe Given By: Sofia Valenzuela/Jon Sugimoto

We try to keep the shrimp and scallops to the outside so they don't get overdone and the chicken right down the middle where the griddle is hottest. Napa cabbage lays across the cooked meat or vegetables and wilts as it steams.

Here's what our table layout looks like. We keep the raw meat separate from the vegetables. You can see Katie in the background taking photos for the blog.

This photo shows our place settings. We each have a small bowl of rice and a small bowl of the dipping sauce. The margarine is on hand in case the food begins to stick. Most of the vegetables taste better with a little margarine coating the cooking surface anyway. We try to have forks to turn the food and chopsticks to eat with, but when it's family we don't follow that rule strictly.

This is a do-it-yourself teppanyaki meal.

Japanese: teppan (griddle) + yaki (broiling).

douzo omeshiagari kudasai (Japanese: Enjoy your meal!)

Sam's Recipes

We tried some of Sam the Cooking Guy's recipes! It was a lot of fun...we sounded like such foodies while critiquing the recipes at the dinner table.

We first tried Ginger Scallops. (I'm not going to print the recipes here since you can find them online through the links.) I DID NOT care for this recipe because I'm not a fan of a lot of ginger. Mark was wondering why I would want to try this recipe in the first place because of that fact...I guess I was caught up in the prettiness of the dish or something. Anyway, even though I did not care for the dish all that much, I DID EAT about 5 scallops (2 to start, 3 as seconds) so I didn't "hate" it that bad, did I? :) It is scallops, so how bad could it be? Anyway, if we try the recipe again, we will use half the ginger, add a little garlic and increase the green onions...now, that sounds yummy.

The recipe was super easy to make and it looked very pretty. My family did not really care for this recipe either, btw. If you LOVE GINGER, then give this a try.

Pretty in the dish

Pretty on the plate

Next we tried Chicken Spring Rolls. We LOVED THEM! That's putting it mildly...there were so many moans of ecstasy and full tummies it was silly. We are making them again tonight so we can share the recipe with my Dad who's coming for dinner. We LOVED THEM! I had never tried anything with egg roll wrappers before; it was easy & fun making this healthy dish. Spring rolls or egg rolls from Asian restaurants do not compare with these; these are packed with so much flavor. Tasty! We didn't use deli chicken. I think Mark picked up a box of Perdue original roasted chicken "something." (pieces, slices?) I then shredded the cold chicken for the recipe. It worked just fine. Want to see a picture?

We thought we'd leave off the sesame seeds - didn't know if the kids would like them. They didn't change the flavor profile at all and we thought the ones with the seeds were prettier. Next time we'll probably add seeds to all of them. I do have ONE LITTLE PET PEEVE...Sam doesn't give you cooking times (he uses the excuse that our ovens are all different.) That means you're totally in the dark when it comes to guessing how long it will take to get the spring rolls to a golden brown. We let ours cook for 20 minutes. Come on, Sam, give some general guidelines! We could have timed our two dishes a little better if we had known.

We've created little blog monsters...they love taking pictures of food now before each meal.