3 for 3

Yesterday was a great day in the Webster kitchen. Three new meals tried with three resounding successes!

For breakfast I made biscuits, but wanted something else to go with them. Ben suggested chocolate muffins, so I decided to try making some chocolate gravy for the biscuits instead. I don't know that I've ever tried chocolate gravy, but I remembered that Jody liked it when he was little, so I pulled up my trusty All Recipes website and found Southern-Style Chocolate Gravy. Both of the boys actually devoured their biscuits and Ben ate another one too!

Jody and I are both lovers of all types of Asian cuisine, but have never been able to make a good stir-fry recipe. It's never as good as what you get in a restaurant or even as good as those boxed or bagged meals from the grocery store that are so expensive. Then I found the Super-Easy Stir Fry recipe. It's much less of a recipe and more of a tutorial on the art of making a good stir-fry. You choose the meat, the veggies, and the sauce and it tells you how to prepare everything to make an amazing meal. We used chicken as our meat and a bag of frozen broccoli, green beans, corn, carrots, water chestnuts, and peppers as our veggie selection with the soy-sesame sauce. After being disappointed so many times when trying to make our own Asian food, this was a resounding success! And since there are so many ways to change it, we won't get bored with the same old meal over and over again.

I knew we had a bunch of errands to run before dinner time, so I decided to make soup in the crockpot because it would be ready when we walked in the door. This time I tried the Slow-Cooker Chicken Tortilla Soup, which only took a few minutes to prepare once I cooked the chicken. Although the boys were less than thrilled (mostly because they don't like soup), Jody and I were impressed. There was tons of chicken and the flavor was excellent. Much like the stir-fry, there was lots of room to alter the recipe to your own preferences.

And for dessert, we already had some cookie dough made in the fridge so I baked some Big Soft Ginger Cookies, one of our favorite cookie recipes. They were the perfect ending to an already yummy day.

*on a side note: Ben had his staples removed yesterday too. It was equally as exciting as having them put in, with just as much screaming and even more blood! The first staple was just a tiny bit hard to get out and once he felt the first twinge of pain, he once again freaked out. Of course once he started fighting and screaming, he began to bleed more as his blood pressure got up. He even had to leave the doctor's office with a head bandage on because he bled so much. I feel sorry for the poor souls in the waiting room (or even outside for that matter) who had to endure his screams before they were treated.