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.