Butternut Squash Sauce, Roasted Chicken Quarters and Stuffed Mushrooms

This one has a few different parts to it so scroll down to get the different recipes for each!

Roasted Chicken Marinade 

INGREDIENTS

Chicken quarters

Olive oil

Lemon juice

Sage

Thyme

Oregano

Salt

Pepper

Rosemary

Poultry seasoning

Blazin' pepper bourbon seasoning (la grille clubhouse brand)

HOW TO

Preheat the oven to 380 degrees Fahrenheit. Place your Chicken Quarters into a baking dish. I typically make 4-5 at a time.

in a small mixing bowl, pour about 4 table spoons of olive oil. Squeeze in some lemon juice, and because I never use specific measurements for any of my recipes I can only say to add these spices and herbs in any amount that is entirely up to your discretion. Because this is a marinade, it is harder for me to ball park my measurements the way I've done with my other recipes. Anyway, mix everything together, take a brush and brush the marinade on your chicken. 

Roast it in the oven between 45 min-1hr. You'll know it's ready when the chicken skin is a darker golden brown.

*sometimes I like to change up my recipes for roasting my chicken. For a change on things, you can try adding thin slices of yellow potato on top with spanish onion slices and crumbled feta cheese. Or you can even try crushing garlic with a mortar and pestle (because I'm an old fashioned apothecary) or you can throw a clove of garlic into a magic bullet and crushing it that way... mix it in with two table spoons of honey and coat it over the chicken with thyme, pepper, salt and oregano. 

Butternut Squash Sauce

INGREDIENTS

2 cups of diced butternut squash (diced into roughly 3/4 inch pieces, the smaller the better)

10 mini portobello mushrooms chopped

1 1/2 cup of sliced spanish onion

1 Red bell pepper (sliced) optional

Tbsp Thyme

Tsp Oregano

Tsp Black pepper (ground)

1/4 tsp salt

Tsp Sage (dried and ground)

2 Tbsp Olive Oil

500 mL Table Cream 18%

HOW TO

In a large sauce pan, or even a large pot, heat olive oil and butternut squash (all) on medium. When the oil begins to boil, GRADUALLY (this is the most important part if you've never made a cream based sauce before...GRADUALLY) pour in the table cream, start off with just enough to cover the bottom of the pot with a thin layer of cream and let boil. Add the mushrooms, onions and peppers if you chose to use peppers. You'll want to let this saute for a bit, while continuing to gradually add the table cream. It is vitally important that you add the table cream slowly so that it can thicken, otherwise you'll end up with a soup instead of a sauce.

Add all the necessary spices to satisfy your personal tastes, I think the measurements I put in should suffice, though I may have added more oregano and thyme then I recorded because those two herbs I tend to add generously to everything I cook.

Once the butternut squash is soft to the point where its almost mushy, your sauce should be done..the mushier the better. I'm not kidding.

Stuffed Mushrooms

So this particular stuffed pepper recipe turned out amazing, the only reason why I did this one was because I literally had no ingredients on me, but this ended up working out phenomenally considering my lack of materials.

INGREDIENTS
Mini portobello mushrooms
Lemon juice
Red pepper
Ground black pepper
Cider Vinegar
Lemon juice
Feta Cheese
Yellow potato
Red Onion
Oregano
Thyme
Olive Oil

HOW TO
Wash all the vegetables and remove the stalks from the mushrooms.
To make the stuffing:
Dice the red peppers, dice the red onion, and run a yellow potato through a cheese grater so you get shreds of yellow potato.
add the ingredients to a mixing bowl, and add spices. Regardless of how much olive oil and cider vinegar you use, you're going to want to stick to these proportions: 5 parts olive oil, 1 part cider vinegar. Add lemon juice as you see fit. Crumble the feta cheese and add it to the stuffing.
Stuff the mini portobello mushrooms and drizzle with olive oil.
Bake in the oven for 12-15 minutes at 350 degrees farenheit.
ET VOILA! Bon Appetit!

Just a bit of the prep..

Don't forget to get a little bit tipsy. Alcoholic beverages always make for a better dinner.

And eat well!!

Spinach & Mini Bocconcini Salad

So I was asked to post this recipe up. It's sincerely nothing special, but it is one of my all time favourite go-to snacks.

INGREDIENTS

Baby spinach
Red bell pepper
mini bocconcini cheese
mini portobello mushrooms (portobellinis)
Lemon
Olive Oil
Ground Black Pepper
Balsamic Vinegar

HOW TO

Wash all your vegetables, that's a no-brainer.

Chop mushrooms, and slice red bell peppers thinly.
Throw the mushrooms, red bell peppers and baby spinach into a bowl. Throw in the mini bocconcini. Really that's all!
For a dressing, I use a mixture of three parts olive oil, one part balsamic vinegar, squeeze about half a lemon's worth of lemon juice and sprinkle ground black pepper into it, I add between a quarter to a half a teaspoon of ground black pepper.

et voila!

Spinach & Feta Stuffed Chicken and Potato Stacks from scratch!

So we obviously know I love to cook and my best friend's favourite food is stuffed chicken breast.

Before she moved, we decided to make a quick-fix meal for her going away dinner.

We decided to make my scratch recipe for stuffed chicken breast and potato stacks, so here's how I do it! Trust me, it tastes amazing!

Stuffed Chicken Breast Recipe (scratch)

Serves 4

Ingredients:

4 boneless chicken breasts

2 1/2 cups of spinach

250g of 100% goat feta cheese (crumbled, quantity may vary by personal preference)

2 tbsp balsamic vinegar

3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

1 tsp lemon juice

1/2 tsp oregano

1/2 tsp sage

1/2 tsp thyme

1/2 tsp ground pepper

1/4 tsp rosemary

1/4 tsp salt

Instructions: 

1. Preheat the oven to 350 F

2. Wash the spinach.

3. To make the stuffing, mix everything together. No, I'm not joking when I say mix EVERYTHING but the chicken in a mixing bowl. You may add or lessen the amount of herbs depending on your preference of flavour. Keep in mind that I never measure anything when I cook because I tend to add ingredients by eye, however, this is roughly the amount I used in my recipe (I may have put a more generous amount of oregano). 

4. Take out your boneless chicken breasts and cut them as you would a loaf of bread through the middle to create what would typically mimic a sub-sandwich fold.
5. Open up the boneless chicken breast where you cut them and lay it out flat. 

6. Put your stuffing on the chicken generously, fold the chicken closed over the stuffing. You can visualize what I'm trying to say a little better if you simply look at the picture of what the finished product looked like.

7. Place the chicken breasts in a baking dish, brush a layer of Olive oil over each chicken breast and season with spices/herbs/salt/pepper sparingly.

8. Bake in the oven between 35-45 min. Check the oven regularly to ensure it doesn't burn. You may think that 35 min is not long enough to bake a chicken breast, but trust me, once it exceeds 45 min, you'll have a dry as f*ck chicken.

 Potato Stacks Recipe (scratch)

Ingredients:

4 Large yellow potatoes

2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

1 tsp lemon juice

1 tsp balsamic vinegar

1/2 tsp rosemary

1/2 tsp thyme

1/2 tsp ground pepper

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 F

2. Peel the potatoes and cut it into thin slices.

3. In a baking tray, stack the potatoes

4. Mix all the ingredients (excluding the potatoes) in a bowl.

5. Brush the mixture over the potato stacks

6. Bake in the oven for 30 minutes or until edges of stacks are golden brown.

(Try topping the stacks with a bit of crumbled feta)

Et voila! 

My scratch recipe for spinach and feta stuffed chicken breast with seasoned stacked potatoes!

Bon Appetit 

-czaR2D2

No-Meat Stuffed Peppers Recipe from scratch

Okay, so here's the deal; Yesterday, I didn't have any food or available meat to cook and was starving! If anyone knows me well enough, they're probably aware of my avid addiction to heavy red meat. Clearly, I was in utter despair because all I had in my fridge were vegetables.
After pulling all the produce out of my fridge, I realized I had four red bell peppers and since I've never tried making stuffed peppers before, I'd make some with a recipe from scratch.Since it is from scratch I can only give you rough measurements, but the stuffing was enough to fill all four of the peppers so I'll try my best to remember the amount of everything I put in.


INGREDIENTS
4 red bell peppers
for the stuffing:
1 1/2 cups Steamed White Rice
1 Large Egg
3/4 cup of a finely diced yellow potato
1/4 cup of diced white onion
1/4 cup of diced tomato
3 tsp lemon juice
1/2 tsp ground sage
1/2 tsp ground oregano
1/2 tsp ground thyme
1 tsp ground cayenne pepper (use more or less depending on how spicy you want it)


Instructions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a 9X9 baking dish (I personally used glass baking dish), fill the bottom with water up to roughly a centimeter high (or a half an inch).
Cut the caps off the 4 red bell peppers. Place the peppers inside the baking dish in a standing position. When the oven is preheated, cover the bell peppers with foil and place in the oven for 30 minutes covered.

STUFFING:
In an oiled frying pan, on medium-high heat, sauté potatoes and onions until lightly browned. Remove from heat.
For the seasoning, in a small bowl, mix the sage, oregano, cayenne, thyme and lemon juice.
In a larger bowl, mix the steamed rice, with the egg and tomatoes until thoroughly mixed.
Mix in the sauteed onions, sautéed potatoes
On medium-high heat, lightly fry the stuffing in an oiled pan, mix in the seasoning gradually.
When the rice is lightly browned/golden, remove from heat.

This should take roughly 30 minutes or less while the peppers are in the oven. Once the covered peppers are in the oven for 30 minutes, remove the foil and place back in the oven between 20-30 more minutes or until the peppers look roasted.
When the peppers are done, remove from the oven and fill them with the stuffing, accordingly. There should be enough stuffing, maybe even an excess, to stuff the four peppers.
Once you're done stuffing the peppers, you may top it with a sauce of choice, I, however, left the peppers and stuffing as is, though some may choose to top it with sour cream, hot sauce, or ketchup.
And that is my no-meat, stuffed pepper recipe from scratch.
BON APPÉTIT!

czaR2-D2