Recipe #6 How-I-Bribed-My-Boyfriend-To-Decorate-for-7 Hours Chicken & Dumplings

It was chicken-y and dough-y and dumpling-y.  It was magnificent!

Christmas comes just once a year, and although I have been celebrating half-Christmas, I am usually chomping at the bit to get to the holiday season immediately after Halloween.  I start furtively listening to Christmas carols and lighting pine candles as soon as Trick-or-Treating ends.  My favorite part of the Christmas season is putting up the Christmas tree.  I held out as long as I could.  I really did.

I only made it until November 17.

Since I have managed to stuff 3 Christmas trees (one of which is 8 feet tall), 43 feet of garland and countless other decorations into my tiny apartment, I knew I could use help with the decorating—particularly the box-hauling, which is my least favorite part of decorating.

Enter my saint of a boyfriend, who not only volunteered to help me with all of this, but also agreed to haul boxes and unwrap ornaments with a smile on his face and a Santa hat on his head. 

Me with the hero of the hour!  

As a preemptive “thank you” for the help with the decorating, I made him chicken and dumplings.

It was amazing.  The recipe only calls for a few things too, so it was very inexpensive.  I only needed two chicken breasts, 2 cans of cream of chicken soup, some celery, butter, a bit of milk and refrigerated biscuit dough.  I added carrots too, since I had some on hand.

After chopping the celery and grating the carrots (and one knuckle), I dumped all but the biscuits into the crock pot and let it sit for about 6 hours. 

It was gorgeous, even if the carrots did cost me the first layer of skin on my  right, middle knuckle.

Then, about 30 minutes before serving, I just broke up a bunch of the biscuits and dumped them into the soup mixture.  In those thirty minutes, they turned into divine dumpling lumps.

It was delicious!  We ate a ton and still had leftovers to sustain us through our long 7 hour decorating day.

The house also looked amazing!

Recipe #2: The Soup with the Most Jaunty Name Ever

A delicious chili-taco hybrid of excellence!  

While flipping through my cookbooks and trying to decide which recipe to make, the Easy Slow Cooker Recipes book caught my eye.  This week is very busy at work and the weather is starting to get cooler, so I thought this was the perfect week to bust out the Crock-Pot for the season.  Besides, there is something really gratifying about having one's dinner figured out before leaving for work.  

While flipping through the book, I saw it: Amigos Taco Soup Olé.  

To paraphrase the famous jam company, with a name like Amigos Taco Soup Olé, it has to be good.  

I gathered my ingredients, which mostly involved foraging for cans.  Instead of the two cans of chili beans that the recipe called for, I got a can of chili beans and a can of black beans.  I figured, I may as well mix it up.  My can gathering was going fairly well until I got to the tomatoes.  Thank goodness the ingredients were clearly labeled.  Do you know how many kinds of canned tomato products there are?  TOO MANY.  Seriously?  They're tomatoes.  How are there 30 different canned preparations!?  Despite the canned tomato enigma, I made my way home with my ingredients.

Sometimes you cook fancy foods and sometimes you do a lot of dumping cans into things.

I cooked my ground beef the night before, then I plopped all of the ingredients in the Crock-Pot before heading to work.  Thus, my dinner preparation was completed before dawn... like a champ!

When I came home, what awaited me was the greatest hybrid of chili and tacos the world has perhaps ever seen.  I added the cheese that I left out this morning, for fear of soldering it the side of my Crock-Pot for all eternity.  I also garnished it with chips.  If I had been thinking, I would have diced up some green onions, but I didn't think of it until I was halfway through my bowl.  

It was absolutely magnificent.  My dinner guest and I very much enjoyed it and both cleaned our bowls.  

I defy any judge on Chopped to fault my presentation!  They probably even wouldn't call it "rustic," which is the Food Network term for "I just slopped in there and it was totally on purpose."  This is the same kind of fancifiying that goes on when they call a piece of toast a "crostini," even though we all know it's just toast.

I also had plenty of leftovers, which I divided up to fit into my miniature fridge.  I also realized what a price performer this soup is.  My total cost for ingredients was about $13, including tortilla chips.  I will easily get 5-6 servings out of this dinner.  At just $2.60 per serving, this soup is a much better price performer than that $5 Subway sandwich that I ate yesterday.  This recipe was a winner for convenience, budget and taste!

Not the most attractive presentation of the soup, but the recipe yielded a massive quantity.  The cutest squirrel salt & pepper shakers ever are included for size reference.  

2 recipes down.  50 to go!