What a name! I feel really inclined to say ‘people pleasing chicken’ but then I feel terribly cheesy. When I pinned it, that’s what it was called and it went on my kitchen recipe card like that! For the record, the only ‘man’ that ate it was my 12 year old who declared it ‘boy pleasing chicken’.

There are times when I feel like spending the whole afternoon in the kitchen dicing, stirring, mixing and washing. This meal is for those afternoons when I don’t – or when I can’t. The sauce has just three ingredients (four if you count the black pepper) but sometimes that’s all you need and in this case, these three ingredients play off each other so well it tastes like there is more to it than that. It’s a little sharp but has a sweetness to it and is very juicy, it just falls apart with your fork. The best part about it of course is that you can pop it in the oven and get back to whatever else you need to do before dinner time!

I served this with basmati rice and green beans. The rice was a great combo with this chicken because the sauce works well with it as well. We poured the leftover sauce on the rice. Wee One #1 loved it and the other two liked it enough to eat most of it – which is pretty rare around here.

2-4 chicken breasts
1/2 cup of dijon mustard
1/4 cup of maple syrup
1 tablespoon of rice/rice wine vinegar
2 teaspoons black pepper

Just whisk together the mustard, maple syrup and rice vinegar and pour over the chicken breasts in a casserole dish. Sprinkle with black pepper. Cook for 45 minutes at 350.

Happy New Years Eve!! Tonight we’ll celebrate with the littles early and call our parents and then we’ll celebrate at midnight and call a bunch of friends on the East coast at 3am. Hehe. That means YOU, Talea! I am looking forward to tonight, but I’ll wait and show you all the silly fun tomorrow!!

In 2011 I set out to cook and bake my way through Deceptively Delicious. I made a decent dent in it, more than half of the recipes, and I kept making recipes from it this year. There are just a few I haven’t gotten to yet. It’s a fun book full of sneaky ways to add vegetable purees into everyday recipes, focused on getting your kids to eat them but it works just as well with husband and yourself! I’m not big on a lot of the healthiest veggies so I love to add them in to recipes! I know they’re there and I’m getting the benefits of them without sitting down to a plate of spinach, you know?

Here are four of the recipes I made a while ago, but just posted. All of them were simple and tasted great!

	There have been a lot of serious winners from his book in our house and a few not so well received dishes. This one though has become our oldest little one’s favorite snack. He asks fot it several times a week. Just before we moved to LA, I made this for him and a three of his friends and they inhaled it. For the record, none of those kids would ever eat squash or navy beans or even sour cream! (read)
	In a food processor (a blender will work too), mix the water, ricotta cheese, beet puree, vanilla and cinnamon. Pour this into a mixing bowl and whisk in the pamcake mix and grated apple. Don’t mix it too much, it’s supposed to be a little lumpy. I don’t think I have to tell you how to make pancake from this point, but make sure you use the cooking spray because it would be a shame for these babies to stick (read)
	I am the only person in the house that isn’t a big fan of spaghetti and pasta sauce. I actually kinda hate it. If I make it for the fam and I don’t feel like coking something else, I’ll eat it. Another exception is if we are visiting someone and they make it. Otherwise, noooo thank you. This sauce though? Not bad at all. I honestly didn’t mind it at all and I think it was the addition of the sweet potato puree that made it better. (read)
	I was a little nervous to present these to the kids because they’re not big on raisins OR nuts in their cookies so these didn’t go ove too well with them, but a few of my girlfriends were over when I made these and they loved them! No one had any idea there was zucchini in them until I told them. You could add wheat bran or ground flax to these to really up the fiber without changing the taste! Or swap the raisins for dried cranberries! (read)

Super, super easy weeknight dinner (or super lazy weekend dinner ) that tastes like you worked a lot harder than you did. My favorite kind!

We have had a pretty laid back but still busy holiday season. It was different spending the holidays with just the 5 of us (and some wonderful local friends) but there were a lot of pluses to it. At the end of some nights, meals like this were all I was able to muster. Thankfully, my husband and the littles loved them. Phew!

3/4 cup breadcrumbs
3/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
4 chicken breasts, halved
salt & pepper to taste
1 large egg, beaten
2 cups pasta sauce (homemade or jarred)
1/4 cup olive oil
6 ounces mozzarella cheese

Heat oven to 400 (or broiler). Mix breadcrumbs and Parmesan cheese. Season chicken with salt and pepper. Dip chicken in beaten egg, then in crumb mixture, making sure it’s coated all over.

Pour the pasta sauce into the bottom of a baking dish. Heat the oil in a frying pan and cook the chicken breasts until golden (just a couple minutes each side). Then place the chicken on top of the pasta sauce.

Top each piece with mozzarella and bake for about 20 minutes or so. I always serve this with a plate of garlic penne because it goes so well with the pasta sauce, but really, you could use whatever side you like.

So as I mentioned about eleventy billion times last month, we took a road trip out to Las Vegas to celebrate our first American Thanksgiving with our dear friend Nichole and her four children! She is originally from the south and I am..well, I’m me, so we went all out. Our Vegas adventure was short and sweet. We drove out after dinner on Wenesday, checked into Circus Circus, did some late night wandering around the hotel and went to bed alarmingly late. Fun! We had an incredibly lazy Thanksgiving morning, much to Nichole’s dismay, but we did have a fantastic evening together once we finally got there!

The whole menu is pretty crazy, but it was a lot of fun and there were 11 of us total. We had to leave all the leftovers with her (sorry!!), but there are 5 of them so that made sense anyway! She made a lovely turkey with stuffing and gravy, she and her wee ones also made the cranberry sauce, ham, pinto beans, macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes and green bean casserole. I brought my very first sweet potato pie, apple crumble, cocoa brownies for the kids and my trio of tarts; lemon meringue, pumpkin and Sailor Jerry pecan (and of course my cherry apron and matching headband – essential items).

I’m linking to three recipes I just put up on the site from that day. They are all equally bananas-amazing.

	Lemon meringue has been one of my husband’s favorite pies since we met so I have a lot of practice with this, and I’ve tried a few different recipes over the years but this has been the absolute best one. (read)
	These are another piece of the trifecta of awesome that was my tart collection at our first American Thanksgiving. Half a dozen are made without any run and the other half are spiked with Sailor Jerry. (read)
	It sounds typical to say I’m from Canada and I’ve never had sweet potato pie, but I think it’s just all in who you know and my exposure to Southern Belles up to this point has been pretty limited. However, I spent Thanksgiving this year with a real life Southern Gal, and she put me in charge of the sweet potato pie – she even gave me her Granny’s recipe. (read)

On Friday, we picked three of the zillion things there are to do in Vegas with kids and each of them was a hit.

First we just went downstairs to The Adventuredome in Circus Circus. As the name implies, it’s an indoor amusement park, and it’s way bigger than this Canuk remembered from my own childhood! Like, woah. We wanted to get to make sure we got to do all three things before we headed home so we let the kids each pick a couple of rides and away we went! Please note there are very few actual horses on the carousel. Wee One #2 picked the dragon and Wee One #3 picked the flying bunny. There were also flying bears and pigs. I honestly thought that was pretty rad.

We are all a little in love with Vegas and we’re all eager to go back again. This was our first road trip since we moved to LA and I have to be honest, it feels pretty amazing to come home to California. Like, taking a vacation from vacation!

Our next stop was The Silverton to check out the aquarium and the mermaid that was rumored to hang out there. While we waited for her to make her entrance, we saw a leopard print sting ray. What?? We spent some time this summer with Wee One #3′s Godmother, exploring the aquarium in Long Beach and we got to see a lot of sting rays but I had no idea that leopard print sting rays existed! So cool!
The chocolate factory was a must do because every year for years and years and years, going back before I can remember and ending when my granny started getting ‘the old’, my aunt went to Vegas every year with either her girlfriends or her sister in laws or nieces or all of the above. Every single time she came back, she’d bring us Ethel M chocolates. It only felt fitting for us to hit the chocolate factory and pick her up a box of Ethel M chocolate. The kids thought it was pretty cool to see where M&Ms come from, though I’m sure this is not the only place they are made!
	This picture is hilarious to me and really sums up where they are right now. Wee Ones #2 & 3 are crazy and hyper and delightfully insane. Wee One #1? Well, he’s 12 now so he’s not about to get into shenanigans with them ON CAMERA, but trust me, he is just as delightfully insane as they are.

Chicken Pot Pie is one of those meals that pretty much all of us are happy with, though Wee One #2 still picks out the corn. What’s with that? Corn is the hardly-even-a-vegetable vegetable that kids actually eat! Anyhoo, so she ‘hates corn’ but otherwise is happy with this and the rest of us eat it up. I try to make more than one at a time and stick one in the freezer so I can come to my own rescue a couple of hours before dinner and I’m not finished with the kid’s school for the day and my husband is on his way home – insert your own dinner time stress here.

However, I have sometimes used that extra chicken pot pie and am left with the ingredients and no time to make the actual pie. So, enter Bisquick. I will post a proper recipe for homemade Bisquick but essentially it’s just flour, baking powder, salt and either butter or shortening. Also, as far as I’ve read (will need to experiment before I actually post about it) the recipes that include powered milk are the best. So, if you have some Bisquick on hand or the ingredients for homemade Bisquick on hand this recipe is crazy easy. The only painful part (and it’s only painful if you’re dealing with a time crunch) is the rolling out of the pie crust. With this recipe, you mix up the batter, make the filler and then layer it all into a muffin pan. Genius, right? I know! After about 15 minutes or so of prep and then 20 minutes (ish) of baking while I clean up the kitchen, and dinner is done! Which is great because it takes about 35 minutes from the moment my husband signs out of Skype to when he arrives at the front door. So win-win!

You’re welcome.

2 chicken breasts, cooked and chopped
1/2 – 1 cup corn (depending on how much you love or hate corn)
2 teaspoons black pepper
2 teaspoons rosemary (I chop mine a little so they’re not so ‘pokey’ as Wee One #3 would say)
2 – 3 potatoes, chopped and boiled
1/4 cup chicken stock
2 cups chicken gravy

It’s so simple it’s silly to even call it a recipe. Mix the chicken, corn, pepper, rosemary, potatoes and chicken stock in a bowl. Prepare the Bisquick batter (usually just Bisquick and water). Fill each muffin cup about 1/4 full with batter and add filling. Not so little that they’re diet pies, but not so much that they explode in the oven. Then top with the rest of the batter. Voila!
Bake them at 350 for about 20 minutes and clean your kitchen! Kidding. Well, you probably should but I’m not going to bully you into cleaning. At the very least make a simple (cheater) side to go with it – and heat up your gravy! We usually break them open at the table and pour gravy over them. This is pretty obvy one of the kid’s plates and yes, it was attacked by some kind of gravy monster!

It’s no secret that I’m big on full-out meal planning, so of course I have been trying to map out a wonderful Thanksgiving celebration – especially since this year it involves a longish road trip and a long time, long distance friend. It’s also no secret that I adore pretty kitchen gear and ever since I started collecting treasures in our new place in California, I have been absolutely smitten, so I am hunting for the perfect dishes and bakeware to bring with us on our Thanksgiving visit. This amazing giveaway is so timely and right up my alley I am so excited to present it to you guys!

Just three simple steps will get you entered in this giveaway for A set of 4 Harvest Pumpkin Tiny Taper Holders from Williams Sonoma, 10″ x 6″ Scalloped Italian Bakers from Sur la Table and the matching Wire Baker Racks.

1. Check out The Country Crock Chronicle and leave a comment on an article there.

2. Like So Very Domestic on Facebook.

3. Leave a comment here to let me know you did!

A winner will be chosen by a random draw and posted on the blog on Monday, November 12 (the winner will also be contacted via email). The winner must reply with their mailing address within 24 hours or a new winner will be chosen by a second random drawing. Good luck!!

This year we are spending Thanksgiving with a dear friend of mine and her four children, and I have been trying out different side dish ideas to help make it a really special holiday. This was one of my favorites so far (you can find loads more inspiration over at Country Crock and here on the blog in the next couple of weeks).

In trying out and coming up with different recipes for Thanksgiving of course the emphasis leans towards bigger is better and this time of year especially the menus often tend to be a lot richer. We don’t need to give up the richness completely, but it is a smart to make adjustments to recipes to make them healthier for ourselves and our families. Years ago I would have made this recipe with butter, traditional bacon and full fat cheddar cheese. However, with a few small changes I was able to make this recipe much healthier! Country Crock has 0g trans fat, no-nitrate bacon is always a better choice than a bacon (either pork or turkey) made with nitrates and low fat cheese is a no brainer switcheroo.

4 potatoes, sliced about 1/2″ thick
1/4 cup melted Country Crock
black pepper, to taste
8 slices of no-nitrate, turkey bacon, cooked and chopped
8 ounces low-fat shredded sharp cheddar cheese
1/2 cup chopped green onion or chives

Preheat oven to 400 degrees Using a pastry brush, cover both sides of each potato slice with Country Crock and put them on an ungreased baking sheet. Sprinkle with black pepper and cook for about 45 minutes, until potatoes are cooked through.
Once the potatoes are cooked, sprinkle with the cheddar cheese, the bacon and then top with the chives or green onions (or use a mix of the two). Cook for another 10 minutes or so until the cheese is melty and serve alongside your main! I had intended them to be cut up and eaten but more than one person picked them up and ate them as finger food!

Thank you to Country Crock for being a sponsor. I was selected for this opportunity as a member of Clever Girls Collective. All opinions expressed here are my own.

I’ll quickly rhyme off this week’s menu so we can get onto the burritos!

This Week! (Oct 15 – 21)

*I didn’t list desserts because I’m making Halloweeny treats I will be blogging about later

This week’s Menu Monday recipe is called Throwback Burritos because until I made them for these photographs I hadn’t had one in about 13 years. Yes really, and it’s not that I’m all that old really. These were the burritos I lived on with my now husband/then boyfriend and our hilarious roommate Ken. The background on that is that my husband and his roommate go waaaay back, and then I moved in as well years after the fact. No one but Ken ever made these either! I was always strictly on cheese grating duty while he worked his magic in the kitchen.

Now that we are living in Los Angeles, my husband and I have a horrible addiction to Chipotle and while eating a massive Chipotle burrito recently my husband reminisced about all the burritos we used to eat back in the day so I fired off a Facebook message to Ken and we were eating this throwback dinner a few days later.

Most of the instructions here I am pulling straight from the message I got from Ken because his descriptions are pretty bang on, especially when he opened with ‘those burritos were dirt simple’, and I’m all ‘is that why you kept us out of the kitchen?!’ hahaha.

Throwback Burritos via Ken Snider

-large tortillas
-taco seasoning
-Sirarcha/rooster sauce
-minced garlic (though back in the day we used garlic powder)
-some sort of salsa or pico de gallo
-ground beef at least lean/medium (high fat content is needed here to get the smooth texture, if you use extra lean it’ll taste grainy)
-Uncle Ben’s long grain & wild with roasted garlic flavor (you can make this yourself in a rice cooker with some chicken broth and garlic, but if you want the taste you remember you want Uncle Ben’s)
-*fucktons of cheese* (I believe that’s an accurate measurement of the specific amount of cheese needed)

Ok, so first brown ground beef, drain. Add taco seasoning and water (one cup water per packet per pound of ground beef) and simmer until thicken (it won’t thicken much, might want to add some cornstarch or flour, not much, maybe a teaspoon, to allow it to thicken). Now add Sirarcha and garlic to taste. Prep rice and prepare. If you use the uncle bens stuff, it takes two mins in the microwave, which is awesome. (Except I still don’t have a microwave haha).
Add rice to meat mixture and stir. Remove from heat, place in a heat-resistant bowl and refrigerate, for a minimum of one hour. THIS STEP IS CRUCIAL. It’s what allows the fats from the meat and cheese to commingle and congeal into burrito deliciousness. Be patient. Wait. It’s worth it. (Obvy, Ken is a wise, wise man). Then grate your fucktons of cheese and set aside. I put them side by side in the fridge in similar container and cover them.
I usually layered cheese (as a stabilizing agent), then some of the mixture, then cheese, some of the pico de gallo, some more mixture, fold and top with more cheese, and more hot sauce if needed. Nuke for 3-5 minutes and you’re done! (The first time I folded one of these – well the first time this time around – I did it perfectly and crazy fast and my husband goes ‘omg what was what?’ and I was all ‘it came from the back of my brain!’).
Mine were heated in the oven this time around, but I swear, they taste like 1999. <3

Today I’m linking up with Organizing Junkie and Life as a Lofthouse for Menu Monday!

I made this recipe for the first time with a friend who had just learned it from her aunt and it was so simple and so delicious, my kids and my husband were all about me making it at home. It’s hardly even a recipe (with only two ingredients), but I find some of the best meals come from ‘hardly recipes’.

The nice thing about this recipe (besides the fact that it requires little to no effort at all and still tastes amazing), is that you can either cheap out or go high end and either way, it’s pretty good. Of course high end is going to taste better and since there isn’t much to this, you can splurge a little and not really break the bank! We used some fancy organic canned pineapple but there is no reason not to chop up a fresh pineapple! The sausage we used was an apple smoked sausage and man it was perfect for this.

2 cans pineapple chunks (with juice)
2 packages sausages

Chop up the sausages and add them and both cans of pineapple to a large sautee pan (this is when you should start whatever rice you’re going to have with it. We made a basmati pilaf. Cook over medium-high heat until the sugars in the pineapple juice caramelize.
My husband had his side by side, but the rest of us piled ours over a bed of rice and mixed it all together. A side salad is also a smart idea.

This Week’s Menu (Sept 24-30)

Sunday – Stew for the fam, Homemade Spinach Veggie Burgers for me, Rice Krispie Squares for dessert

When I was a kid, scalloped potatoes was my hands down favorite side and maybe to keep the magic of it alive for me, my Daddy would only make it once in a while. I absolutely loved everything about it, like most kids I counted potatoes as my favorite vegetable and also like most kids, I had a real serious love of cheese. Now that I’m older though I understand that wasn’t just the marriage of cheese and potatoes that won my heart with this side, but the creamy, slightly gooey sauce that keeps it all from melting into a big unappetizing clump and the tiny hint of nutmeg. So many of my childhood favorites had a pinch of nutmeg in them. Thanks for setting the bar so high, Daddy! <3

This recipe is not his original. The only irritating thing about my father's kitchen habits is his refusal to use an actual recipe. He calls them a 'springboard' for his kitchen creativity. No controlling this guy with measurements or doing anything the same way twice! So his recipe for the scalloped potatoes I grew up with is a pinch of this and a dash of that and 'it's done when it smells done'. This recipe though, is pretty close!! One of these days, I will try to veganize it!

Personally, I wouldn't attempt to make any kind of scalloped potatoes unless I had a serious mandolin, but if you're good with a knife - by all means slice them thin!

cooking spray
about 5 or 6 medium potaotes, I used red
3 pieces bacon, fried and patted dry
2 tablespoons melted butter
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
3/4 cup cheddar cheese
1/4 cup mozzarella cheese
1 cup fat free milk
1 teaspoon nutmeg
2 teaspoons thyme

After you slice your potatoes as thin as possible (or slightly thicker, if you prefer), fry up and then dry your bacon. Now make a gooey mixture with the melted butter, salt, pepper and garlic powder. Toss the potato slices in it and make sure they’re all evenly coated. Most recipes will tell you to grate your cheese but I slice mine into smallish chunks for this. Spray whatever dish you’re using and arrange about 1/2 of the coated potatoes on the bottom, then cover with about half the sliced cheddar.
Now scald your milk, nutmeg and thyme. Just bring it to a boil and shut it off. Give it another mix to be sure the spices are incorporated. Now add the rest of the coated potatoes, pour the milk mixture over them and top with the rest of the cheddar and the mozzarella and bacon. Cook at 425 for about 45 minutes.

I know Menu Monday is a concept meant to make dinners in busy households a little smoother, if only because you’re aware of what you’re doing before you open the pantry at 5 o’clock and I love that, I really do. I love only having to think about what I’m cooking once a week when I write the list and even then I just put together ideas and requests I’ve jotted down. While I do love serving something everyone loves (that hopefully looks pretty snazzy as well) to my fam every night, breakfast is my favorite meal to prepare for the Wee Ones.

I’m always up looong before them (occasionally, Wee One #3 will surprise all of us and get up when our alarms go off around 5am) so I have way more solo time to prep and set the table than I do in the evenings. Generally, they all wake up hungry. If they didn’t, they tend to develop an appetite when they smell whatever is going on that day.

To me, there are two important things about any meal but I try to be especially mindful of them at breakfast. It has to be packed with as many nutrients as possible and it has to be appealing enough for them to actually eat it. I mean, a bowl of Red River cereal is crazy good for you, it’s about as enticing to most people as a bowl of birdseed (my Daddy and one of my besties, Gill, however will happily sit down to a bowl of birdseed and go ‘mmmm, birdseed’). So, with that in mind, I set the table as pretty as I can with our hilarious extended vacation mismatched silverware and plates and fill their plates with fuel for the day. Kids need energy to squabble over board game rules and cover themselves head to toe in sidewalk chalk, dontchaknow!

As you know from last year, I’ve gotten sneaky with a lot of my cooking and baking so there are untraditional ingredients in a lot of their muffins and breads, but they all work in their favor and the kids either don’t know or don’t care so I keep at it. I generally serve it buffet-style. So I set out plates full of food and then each kid gets their own plate to pick and choose what they want. One of my kids will eat and eat and eat at each meal AND snack all day – my other two have supermodel appetites so they wont each as much at a meal, but they’ll come back half an hour later and ask for a snack so I just offer them breakfast again and again till lunch!

Breakfast this Week (July 16 – 22)

Sunday – Berry Smoothie (with spinach and parsley), Cinnamon Buns, Monkey Bread and maybe Apple Fritter Muffins