Chicken sautee

I've discovered the best thing! Sauté Express cubes (garlic and herb this time) by Land O'Lakes make cooking super fast & easy (tastier too). I love this chicken with green beans & potatoes. I made no substitutions this time- love that it's so few ingredients =D This wasn't supposed to take too long, & it probably won't for you, but our chicken was being defiant & did not want to cook through. Once we finally got that step passed the rest took no time at all. Oh, a tip on finding the green beans (if you're like me & didn't know what part of the store to find these particular ones): at our local store they were w/the fresh produce. which I know makes sense, but I'd never seen any bags there before so I figured I'd just get some frozen ones, until I stumbled upon the right ones. They were sitting right next to a bag of french style beans on the "wall of vegetables" near broccoli (i think). Very very tasty! & filling too. I calculated that one chicken breast & 2 little potatoes (depending on how many pieces you cut them into; but 2 whole ones) & some green beans came to about 4 WWpts+

Cupcakes!

I was sifting through some WW-friendly desserts online the other night and saw this one for chocolate-orange cupcakes. My uncle seemed to obsess over chocolate-orange things while we were all on my trip together and so, thinking of him and knowing he would be in town this wkend, I ended up trying them out in honor of him. I re-calculated everything for myself on myfitnesspal.com (& then on the WW calculator) because I made some changes. I didn't have any orange extract and didn’t want to have to buy it just for this, so I just nixed it. I also used the Betty Crocker super moist triple chocolate fudge cake mix because the store where we were did not have any kind of dark chocolate mix. I left some un-frosted because we have some cream cheese-haters in our midst (crazies!!). Those come to 2 WW pts+ but the normal frosted ones are only 3pts/cupcake (serving= 1 cupcake; recipe made 24 (so you might want to cut it in half if you're NOT planning on having company/sharing). Also if you choose to have a frosted one but leave the orange off of the top it’s still 3 pts, I checked.

They were/are yummy! VERY moist, orange taste is very subtle (mostly cause i didn't use the extract), & the tastiest when iced.

made half of them tiny :)

waiting for them to cool down before putting them up for the night before frosting them

finished product. I left some un-iced & some w/out oranges though

Last week (only recipes I hadn't tried yet. I did a few recipes again that I've already written about on here):

• chicken Parmesan meatloaf muffins: these were interesting, but not my fav. We did actually find pre-ground chicken so we didn't have to grind it ourselves. I thought it was decent at the time, but became less tasty after being leftover in the fridge. 
• pretzel- coated chicken nuggets: I didn't use black pepper or mustard powder- fyi. I ended up running out of egg & pretzel topping mixture a little more than half-way through so I had to add more. The second-batch of crushed topping were bigger pieces (we just smashed these) of pretzels and the first batch (which we put in the food processor) was almost to fine a powder- so i guess you have to get them somewhere in the middle....... but anyway they were tasty, fresh. However not so much after you re-heat them a day later in the microwave & the pretzels aren't crunchy any more. 
• breakfast biscuits: these were very simple & very tasty. the only thing I'd say is work as quick as you can to form the dough over the muffin tins because we had a really hard time once it got warmer and sticky. It even shrunk back down in the end. 
• double chocolate cookies!!: except I threw in some white chocolate chips too & made it TRIPLE =) so tasty. If you're gonna make these for more than 2 people (we had 3, including me) I would recommend doubling the recipe because they were gone in a matter of hours. You could always freeze the leftovers or share w/neighbors/friends.
• beef and broccoli in the CROCKPOT: okay, so unfortunately I had to buy sesame oil (i don't remember how much it was) in the Asian foods section at Walmart, but I only had to use a little bit and it'll last for awhile. But let me tell you it was GREAT! I love beef and broccoli but half the time at restaurants the meat is too chewy. This way you can pick your meat and cut all the fat off of it that you want (or rather DON'T want). The frozen broccoli we bought was mostly the stalks though so watch out for that. Great option for those nights when you won't have time to cook- just get it together the night before (unless you're one of those weird morning people!), put inside of crockpot in the fridge (if it'll fit) & then pop in back in on low on your way to work/school & voila!

This week:

• tonight I made baked broccoli mac&cheese: we used Barilla Cellentani noodles (basically look like a double macaroni noodle) a Tablespoon of onion salt instead of a real one as called for.... I would highly stress the importance of using the correct/ big enough size pots for each step, because at the end I was using our biggest sauce pan/pot (besides the big giant one we use for spaghetti noodles) to mix the cheese sauce into everything & it was too hard- led to many plain noodles that hadn't gotten mixed properly. but fairly tasty. 
• yesterday I tried this pine nuts chicken: It turns out that pine nuts are expensive (according to my mom who went in search of them at the store) so we substituted the chopped baking almonds instead & it worked well in our opinions. I learned how to steam asparagus (supposedly you're not supposed to boil it but we don't have a steamer so we put it in a shallow dish w/a tad of water & kinda arranged the whole pound of asparagus in there so that it was as flat as possible with the big ends (after cutting off the thicker ends) in the middle where possible. It cooked about 3 mins and then i checked it & i think it ended up needing to go longer). I would suggest separating the 2tsp of olive oil and using as little as possible for the chicken-browning because you have to use some (even though it didn't seem to point that out) for the other sauteing too.  I actually used (thanks to mom's help) real garlic & onion (instead of shallots) this time. .... anyway i don't remember deviating from anything too much. but I did discover that i really like tarragon. it smells nice and isn't as strong & "herby" as rosemary. The other thing to say is that I think I reduced the broth down too much so in the end it wasn't liquidy pretty much at all- so we rolled the nuts & asparagus around in what was left & put them on the plate next to the chicken (oh the chicken ended up needing to bake a little longer too) & sprinkled the nuts on top.