A new recipe and a new love

Actually, two new loves! We'll start with those. This has nothing to do with my list, but worth talking about anyway. :)

#1: Chewy, Giant Nerds candy. Nerds are great just as they are, but these new chewy, giant version are wonderful! I think you should go out a buy a box right now!

#2: Trader Joe's grocery store. We've had one for a couple years now--maybe even longer than that. I don't keep up with that kind of thing too often. However, it's about 20 minutes away, so I never even thought about going to check it out. Josh just got back from California on Friday, though, and while he was there, he got to have the Trader Joe's experience. After hearing him talking about it, I definitely wanted to try it! And I was in LOVE! There were so many good things! But we made sure not to go over our grocery budget. :) A few noteworthy things I was excited to buy: Trader Joe's little peanut butter cups, 3-cheese pizzas, their refridgerated pizza crust, frozen stir fry, protein drinks, and lemonade iced tea. And there's a few things I'm excited to try next time we go back, including the orange chicken. Yum! If you have one near you, I'd recommend you go to it!

Ok, now onto the list. I'm still working on #38: make a new recipe each month. This month's recipe doesn't have a name, I don't think. But I'll made one up anyway. Let's call it "Squirrel Chicken." But don't worry, there's no squirrel meat in it. It was just so good, it made me think of a squirrel! I got this "recipe" from my good friend, Liz. I put "recipe" in quotes, because I didn't really have a recipe, and neither did she. I'm sure there's an actual recipe for this somewhere, but she just told me a meal she likes to make.

Here's the ingredients involved:

Chicken breasts (we used two, because there's 2 of us)
Olive Oil
Italian style bread crumbs
Provolone cheese slices (like the deli slices)
Toothpicks

And here's the "recipe:

Pound each chicken breast with one of those meat-pounder things to make it thinner. (these aren't technical terms)
Pour some olive oil on each chicken breast--make sure it's covered in it
Dip chicken breast in the bread crumbs
Place chicken breast on a plate and put a piece of provolone cheese on top.
Roll up the chicken breast and put some toothpicks in it to make it stay.

Put in greased pan.
And bake.

Now, since we didn't have an actual recipe, I just baked it for 30 minutes at 375 degrees. I started out doing 20 minutes, but after I took them out and cut them open, I saw they weren't quite done yet, so I put them back in the oven for 10 more minutes. That seemed to be a good amount of time.

And they turned out very well! Josh was very pleased with this dinner. Josh made us mashed potatoes and we also had a vegetable to round out our meal.

Here are some pictures of the chicken:

Now, you'll see on the left of this picture, that piece of chicken isn't rolled up. That was a "problem" piece of chicken. Problem meaning, it just didn't want to be rolled. Very stubborn squirrel chicken. I think the next time I make this, actually, I'm going to do that instead. I'm sure it'll taste the same, it'll cook much quicker, and it'll save me time and patience trying to roll them! I wasn't very good at that. :) All in all, it was a great meal though!

One last picture for your viewing pleasure:

This is Josh (after un-grouting our bathtub) holding the bottle of wine I got him for his birthday a few years ago. I customized the label of a picture of us, and we tried to keep it all this time. However, I don't think it wants to be kept, as it is now growing something nasty in the bottom of the inside of the bottle. Therefore, it was time to say good-bye to the wine bottle. It was a sad day. Not only because we had to throw out the wine bottle--but also because of the events that occurred during the un-grouting process. But that's for another blog. I'm not ready to talk about that yet.