I love me some Ree Drummond (aka The Pioneer Woman), I love her too much to post recipes from her book on my blog – hoooowever, she has posted some recipes from her book on her blog and I feel comfortable sharing those. Not all of them, so you’ll have to buy her cookbook if you want to make her roasted cauliflower – which you should absolutely do!

This recipe, for a slooooow cooked shredded pork that will make your home smell alarmingly good. I mean that – alarmingly good. Especially if you’re in and out of the kitchen or if you go outside to play in the yard and then you come in – zomg so so good. Kind of like when you cook down stew all day, but times about eleventy billion.

Dr Pepper Shredded Pork via Pioneer Woman

1 whole large onion
1 whole pork shoulder (5 – 7 lbs)
salt & pepper
1 11 oz can chipotle peppers in adobo sauce (or whatever chilies you can find in sauce you like)
2 cans Dr. Pepper
2 tablespoons brown sugar

I couldn’t find the chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, but being that I live in Southern California I’m sure it’s just because I only looked in one place and then made the executive decision to just use a can of green chilies in some other kind of sauce because I just wanted to cook this crazy concoction already. Ahem. So, I did.

This an an all day situation, but thankfully it requires very little babysitting. Start by cutting an onion into quarters and break the layers apart a bit. Lay them on the bottom of your pan. Salt and pepper the roast and plunk that on top of the onions. Now empty the can of peppers or chilies onto the roast. Then the Dr Pepper. Then the brown sugar (add this into the liquid and not just on top of the roast).

Now pop it in the oven for somewhere in the neighborhood of six-eight hours. I checked on mine at the 5 hour mark and turned it on it’s side. Then again at 6 hours and turned it again. At 7 hours it started to fall apart perfectly.

You can use this meat for whatever you can think of. I served this on sesame buns with a rice pilaf and green beans. 🙂 A serious hit with all 5.

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.

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.

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!

I first saw this recipe on my girl Sammie’s blog, The LaMay Bakery, and it looked amazing. We are total kitchen soul mates and our families tend to like the same meals so I went with it and it was as big of a hit here as it was at her house! The not too cheesy, just crunchy enough combo did it for my husband, the butter was a serious win for Wee One #1 and the other two are head over heels for pretty much any variation on breaded chicken.

It’s very similar to the chicken strips I make, except this is cooked in butter and there is shredded cheese in the bread crumbs. It’s arguably much easier and faster than the strips because with this recipe you’re working with half a chicken breast per person in a single piece instead of about the same amount of chicken, pounded out and sliced into eleventy billion smaller pieces. Both are now requested on the regular, so similarities aside, it’s always nice to add another meal to the list of things everyone around here loves.

Cheddar Baked Chicken – via Allrecipes

1/4 cup melted butter
1/2 cup flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 egg
1 tablespoon milk
1 cup shredded cheddar cheese
1/2 cup Italian seasoned bread crumbs
1 cup crispy rice cereal
3 skinless, boneless chicken breast halves – cut in half
2 tablespoons melted butter

First prep your bowls, you’ll need three. In the first one mix the flour, salt, pepper, and garlic powder. In the second one, beat the egg and milk together and in the last one combine the bread crumbs cheese and cereal. I totally spaced on the cereal so I made mine without it!	Coat your baking dish with the 1/4 cup of melted butter and dredge (aka plunk) each chicken piece first in the flour mixture…
…then in the egg mixture and finally in the bread crumb mixture before moving each piece to the baking dish.
Bake for 35 minutes or so at 350! So so so good!