Slow Cooker Chili

Have you noticed I've been slightly MIA again? I hang my head in shame because already I haven't been able to keep up enough with my blog, editing it A LOT of work. More than even writing a book perhaps and to top it off, I decided to start another blog for my writing to keep my hopefully soon to be readers up to date on me. There's not much going on over there yet, but feel free to check it out here and please feel free to drop me a line saying so. I love hearing from all of you.

But let's get back to the important stuff...like food or better yet like that delicious bowl of chili I have pictured above. Truth be told a few years ago chili was not my thing, but it gradually grew on me. I was ultimately sold on chili when the husband and I had chili at Robinson's Tea Room, this unbelievable quaint and cute tea house in my area. I even got to do a restaurant review for them through Patch, a company I occasionally freelance for. It was a great experience and the owners there are just lovely, wonderful people. (See drinking tea brings out a new side of me using words like lovely and quaint!). Anyway, there chili is top notch, they have huge (tender) chunks of flank steak mixed in with chopped meat, jalapenos and beans making for an amazing bowl of chili. I wanted to replicate it and though mine was nowhere close to theirs, it was pretty darn good and we had leftovers for days!

Stuffed Chicken Breast with White Wine Sauce

The first holiday is behind us and after lazing around for a long weekend, decorating, shopping and of course eating Monday came and went and I realized it was time to get back to the grind. To kick things off after a weekend of heavy foods, desserts and drinks I decided to go for a lighter dinner. This is a play on a favorite chicken dish of mine that my husband makes for me, but make to be a bit lighter. His version involves breading and frying the chicken while mine I bake in the oven. I'll admit his is better, but in the spirit of saving a few calories, I went with this version of the dish.

I stuffed the chicken with some fontina cheese, sun dried tomatoes and caramelized onions, topped it with a garlicky white wine sauce and served it with some broccoli. The sauce is what really brings this dish together, you can stuff the chicken with whatever you prefer or whatever is in your kitchen. It's a really versatile dish that you can have fun with.

Summer Chicken Bruschetta

Summertime always brings the promise of one of my favorite meals....bruschetta. To some people bruschetta is more of a an appetizer but I prefer it as my actual meal. Whether it be on top of a crusty Italian bread or a breaded chicken cutlet, it's a perfect summer meal to me.

To me bruschetta is perfect as is; tomatoes, basil, a little red onion and some olive oil, but this time I wanted to change it up a bit. My inspiration started by purchasing a fresh out of the oven loaf of bread from Whole Foods. It was a thick crusty Italian bread that was just screaming for me to top it off with some fresh bruschetta. Back at home I realized I had already taken some chicken cutlets out to defrost the night before so I needed to incorporate them into dinner, so I figured why not make a chicken brushetta? It was a major success and got tons of praise from my husband and I can't wait to make it again.

Pancetta & Caramelized Onion Pizza

Here's a little bit of trivia that I haven't mentioned on here before, for our wedding my husband and I wanted to come up with a unique favor so we decided to write a cookbook. And not just any cookbook, a pizza cookbook. You see my husband worked in a pizzeria for quite a few years working his way up from busboy to pizza man to manager. So we sat together and rattled off a list of 50 plus pizzas and I pieced them together into formal recipes, we proofread it and proofread it again and finally sent it off to be published. We even gave them out to our guests in pizza boxes customized with their names at the end of the night. Over two years later we still get a ton of compliments on the favor and he still gets requests from friends to bring it in to show them the book from time to time. Our cookbook is even for sale on Amazon, which I think, is pretty freakin' cool.