Thursday, November 25, 2010

First Family Meal

When I did my first order for $400. I made sure to get a Pantry Basics Collection. This is both so I can taste many meals without purchasing the items individually, and because it's the base for the 4 meals in 4 minutes. I can showcase these meals at your home party so you and your friends can learn more! The Pantry Basics comes with four Pantry Staples, the cute little containers, scoops and recipe cards. You save almost $20 when you buy the collection instead of buying the items individually.
The recipe I decided to try first was the Garlic Basil Seasoning meal which is one of the 4 meals in 4 minutes. The intention of the 4 meals in 4 minutes is to have meals in your freezer, but they can also be cooked immediately. I decided to do mine immediately. The recipe was Garlic Basil Seasoning, 3 pounds of Chicken and a can of tomatoes. I dumped the frozen chicken in the slow cooker (one bag from the grocery store) the can of tomatoes and the seasoning. Done. Cook 4 hours and enjoy!
My daughter is not a fan of new foods so I try and always have something on the table she will eat. That night I decided to make spaghetti with the chicken. The reasoning behind this is i figured it would make a good match, and my daughter would eat it. We ate and it was pretty good. I think I would have preferred it if the chicken had been thawed and the seasoning could get more into the chicken, but for a meal that literally took less than a minute to throw together it was great!
You might have noticed I did say I used 3 pounds of chicken. This is what the recipe calls for so that is what I did. I will probably go ahead and cut recipes in half in the future because we ate on this all week! Here were the leftover meals:
1. I took a piece of chicken and mixed it with the leftover spaghetti. This was okay, but dry. My husband doesn't like tomatoes so in saving the chicken leftovers I did not save many tomatoes.
2. I cut the chicken (mashed it really it was very tender) and heated it along with some Orzo pasta on the stove. This was a good pairing. The orzo is a small pasta and so unlike the spaghetti it was not as overwhelming and since it was fresh it wasn't too dry. I also added a little chicken broth to the chicken as I re-heated it. This was good but a little bland. Don't worry we had lots of leftovers!
3. I put the chicken and the orzo together to save and this was still enough to get another meal out of! The third (and final) meal I made was the saved chicken and orzo plus some velveeta cheese. I put in about 4oz of the cheese and melted it while heating the leftovers in the oven. When I went to stir it I made a bad) decision that it needed more cheese. I added another 3-4 oz and stirred that in also putting it back in the oven to melt the cheese and heat the chicken and pasta. I should have stopped with the first 4oz. We did eat the cheese chicken and orzo, but it was a little more cheese than it should have been. I don't mind the taste of velveeta, but I would have liked to taste the chicken and orzo also. The leftovers from this (about one more meal worth) went down the drain no way to save it from the cheese.
To recap: The Garlic Basil Chicken made 4 meals for a family of 3 and could have done one more if not for the invasion of too much cheese. I would say we liked the chicken and will most likely repeat this meal in the future, but with less cheese on the last rendition.

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