Even in the year 3000, the question will be "what's for dinner?"

If anyone else happens to remember that commercial from the 1980s promoting canned food, then mad props to you. There is nothing more weird than a space housewife promoting canned vegetables, and if that doesn't promote canned food, then I just don't know what does!

Anyway. My friend Erin periodically runs a post on her food blog called "what's for dinner" and I decided to steal her idea sincerely imitate her and do a post like that of my own. :)

On Friday we made hamburgers with sauteed mushrooms and onions (sauteed in Hickory Smoke Grapeseed Oil), on Thursday we cheated and went to The Chancery for 1/2 price pasta night.

On Wednesday night, however, I made Spaghetti Pie. When I was a kid, my mom made spaghetti pie a lot and it has become one of those nostalgic favorites. I had never attempted to make one myself, though I have tried to make lasagna and have deemed it to be a lot of work and I don't like making it that much. Spaghetti pie, however, is another story.

I don't really have any recollection of what recipe my mom used, so I poked around online and found one that sounded good at AllRecipes.com. There were a number of spaghetti pie recipes there, but I settled on Spaghetti Pie II because it sounded the easiest and most basic.

Since I had never made this recipe before, nor had I ever made a spaghetti pie before, I decided to just follow the recipe more or less as is, except that after I had made the "crust" (spaghetti, 2 eggs, and 2tblsp of butter in a pie pan), I realized I had bought tomato paste, but no diced tomatoes. Oops. Luckily, one of the reviewers of the recipe noted that instead of tomatoes/tomato paste, they used spaghetti sauce. So I used a plain spaghetti sauce instead, and it turned out fine- you're just mixing the tomatoes/paste with ground beef, onions and green peppers anyway.

Aside from that minor substitute, I followed the rest of the recipe as is. It turned out really good and was not that hard. Now that I have a basic recipe down, it will be easy to substitute and do my own variations of it. I am also going to ask my mom for her spaghetti pie recipe to see how it differs- I don't remember having that much ground beef in the pie as a kid.

I recommend this recipe- easy, tasty and for me, nostalgia. But unlike some nostalgia (like Sunny Delight - ew), this one is still good. :)

Chicken Tortilla Soup

I love Mexican food, and I'm lucky enough to live in a city where there is a large percentage of Mexican restaurants. :) That being said, however, I have only found two places with a suitable Tortilla Soup- La Carreta at the El Dorado Seaside Suites in Riviera Maya, Mexico, and Riviera Maya Mexican Restaurant (I'm sensing a common theme here...) right here in Milwaukee. Since La Carreta is a bit far away (ha) and Riviera Maya is a bit expensive, I decided to try making my own.

I found this Slow-Cooker Chicken Tortilla Soup recipe on AllRecipes.com, and decided to give it a shot. It was ridiculously easy, ridiculously tasty, and relatively healthy. I didn't make any modifications to this recipe at all.

The "hardest" part of the recipe was the chicken shredding, because it's pretty tedious. General chicken shredding instructions found here, thanks to eHow. I used the boiling water stovetop method, no pounding involved. Something the tutorial doesn't say but I've found has been extremely helpful is to cut the chicken into small strips. The cooking time is much shorter, and it's easier to shred smaller pieces of chicken than a full sized chicken breast. Today's chicken came from Trader Joe's, and I mis-read the label and bought chicken tenderloins, so they were already pre-cut and smaller, but cutting regular chicken breast into the tenderloin size would work too.

I used La Preferida mild red enchilada sauce and diced green chiles. I'd like to try making the enchilada sauce when I make this again, but for now the La Preferida was just fine. The recipe also called for a can of whole peeled tomatoes- mashed. I decided to go for the mashing tomatoes with a fork method. :)

Chopped the onion using our Slap Chop, which was courtesy of my family's Xmas White Elephant exchange. It makes chopping onions much easier and tear free- I highly recommend getting one, especially if you like onions!

After the chicken, onions, enchilada sauce, green chiles, tomatoes, garlic, chicken broth and water- we added the cumin, salt, pepper, bay leaf and chili powder. Since I'm a spice snob, I used chili powder from Penzey's (while Penzey's is a specialty spice shop- they have amazing spices, and if you subscribe to their catalog they have amazing coupons. For example, the first catalog I got had a coupon for a free Cajun spice.)...I highly recommend Penzey's if you live near one, and be sure to sign up for their mailing list!

The last things to be added was the frozen corn, and fresh cilantro. I had picked up a bag of fire-roasted corn at Trader Joe's about a month ago and it was PERFECT. The recipe calls for 1 tablespoon of cilantro, but since i had bought a bunch of fresh cilantro at Piggly Wiggly, we added way more.

I took this picture prior to turning on the CrockPot. Since I didn't get a chance to go to Trader Joe's to pick up the chicken until about 2:00, I had to cook it for 3 hours on high instead of 7 hours on low.

Right before the soup was done, we made the tortilla strips. We sliced up 5 soft corn tortillas, brushed them with garlic olive oil from the Olive Cellar.

I put them in the oven for about 8-10 minutes at 450 since the recipe did not really specify, but next time I may put them in for 15 minutes at about 350 instead.

The tortilla strips were perfect. Next time, I may try using our chipotle oil from the Olive Cellar, or chili olive oil from The Oilerie. They also might be a fun snack to make with leftover corn tortillas.

All in all, this recipe did not require that much assembly and it turned out delicious!

Caloric count: 262 calories per serving (recipe does not specify serving size), or approx. 2000 calories for the entire pot of soup. Our pot yielded five large bowls- approx 400 calories, or 8 WW points per bowl. Since it was heavy on the protein, it was also very filling so we didn't have any side dishes with it at all.

I cannot say enough good things about this recipe and I encourage you to try it out yourself. It was super easy to make, super tasty and the most difficult part was shredding the chicken. It would be a perfect weekend dinner because you can assemble it in the morning and then put the crock pot on low and let it cook all day. Depending on time, you could also make it in the morning before work, but since shredding chicken is a huge chore for me, I don't think I'd ever make it during the week if I had to work during the day. :)

Blog Revamp!

I've decided that my weight loss blog needed a "makeover" of sorts since I have been lax in keeping up with it. :) So I decided to expand my blog to include frugal living, since I still have no job. The "good" part about having lots of free time is that I also have lots of free time to come up with cooking ideas, rather than just eating prepackaged food (okay, not that I cook very much, especially in the summer because summer is when Andy grills out a lot). For example, last week, we took this Wisconsin Native's Beer Cheese Soup recipe that I found on AllRecipes and added Sprecher Black Bavarian Beer to it. It was absolutely delicious (albeit anything but healthy with the 6 cups of cheese and an entire stick of butter). In terms of frugality, however, I had spent about $4 on a cup of beer cheese soup at a coffee shop, making an entire pot of beer cheese soup was much more economical. We did end up inviting over my parents and our neighbor to help us consume the beer cheese soup that night so that we wouldn't have leftovers, but under normal circumstances, we could freeze leftovers.

Anywho, I will also soon be renaming the blog to reflect that new changes. For now, it's been temporarily titled "Lauren's Healthy & Frugal Living" but I'm going to spend some time brainstorming a more clever name. :)