Earlier in the week, Greg told me he was putting his bone-in, skin-on chicken breasts on sale.
So I started thinking about recipes, and what to make that would accent his sale best.
My niece, Desire, shared a recipe that I thought might work,
and I made plans to get the extra ingredients I don’t have in the house
(pine nuts for the pesto and sundried tomatoes – I’ve never cooked with them,
but Desiree assured me that it was easy and delicious).
Then life happened. Tuesday didn’t go as smoothly as I planned, and with an appointment at noon,
and leaving for training at 5, I just didn’t get time to cook much more than prepping the ravioli for Wednesday’s dinner.
Which, some might say is pretty good, looking at the picture, but if you’ve ever made ravioli,
you would know that it’s just about as easy as spaghetti,
and even easier if you happen to have some leftover cooked chicken in the fridge from a couple days ago
and some packages of ravioli from Schinkels’ in your freezer.
Wednesday, I’m out of the house until 5:00, so no cooking is happening on Wednesdays.
Thursday is the day I decided three weeks ago would be my
“Sacred Website Management and Cooking for the Blog and Recipe Development Day.”
(SWMCBRDD doesn’t work as an acronym, though, does it?).
Yeah, that didn’t pan out this week.
I had training at the agency until noon, and a kid’s eye appointment at 1:30.
I also needed to find a corner desk for the new configuration of our living room,
so I checked out some of the stores in Essex for that.
Didn’t find a desk, but the Eh Little Bit of… store in Essex is really cool.
Arrived home just in time to get two girls off the bus, and walked into this
Not quite the environment for cooking a gourmet meal in under an hour
(we eat at 4:30 on Thursdays), much less one that I would want to take pictures of.
Solution?
Schinkels’ to the rescue!
Got my oven heating to 425°F, got my deep fryer heating to medium high,
grabbed some lettuce and applesauce out of the fridge, and 20 minutes later:
Ok, that ease and perfection speak was all for the blog’s benefit.
In reality, I did run (took the car) to Schinkels’ and grabbed some fries,
corn and nuggets (which happen to be a really good deal right now, by the way),
and had two of my kids clear off the table (only took three repeats and 1 call back)
while I got the nuggets into the oven and got the deep fryer ready.
Thankfully, I had made a really big salad to go with the ravioli last night,
so there were some left over lettuce already cut up and in a bowl,
so that was easy to toss in some Schinkels’ bacon bits and parmesan.
Applesauce I always have on hand (thank you Mom Krale),
and corn is easy for the microwave to handle.
Had the same kids set the table, and used my “I mean it” voice,
so it was done right away and we were ready to eat before Greg came home
and the boys got back from their paper routes.
Voilà!
The really best part of this “Cheater Meal” is the versatility.
I have 7 kids, right now, which means that it can be next to impossible to please all of them
on any given dinner. But tonight, I got cheers and everyone made their own combinations.
and the plates soon looked like this:
Sometimes I really love having Schinkels’ just around the corner.
You, however, will have to wait for the “Chicken Pesto Pasta” recipe blog entry.
