On Saturday night we invited some friends over for dinner. Despite having the luxury of our awesome house, we have been extremely lax in actually inviting people over. This is primarily my fault; Jose often says “hey we should invite everyone over” and I saw “enh…I don’t feel like it.” Basically, I am lazy, but I also have weird anxiety about inviting people to my house because what if they don’t have a good time???
Anyway, we made a couple things worth mentioning.
First: Pioneer Woman’s chicken spaghetti. I had made this once before and it was just as tasty this time. Last time I cut some chicken tenders into bits and cooked them, but this time Jose got an already-cooked rotisserie chicken from the store and ripped that into pieces. I think using the rotisserie chicken made it ever tastier. Perhaps next time I’ll get brave and do the entire recipe as written — which means buying a whole chicken and boiling it, which I have never done and find kinda gross. We’ll see.
Second: Green Beans with Almonds and Caramelized Shallots. This was a side dish with the chicken spaghetti. I made it basically as written, except we didn’t have enough shallots so I used a combination of shallots, onion, and garlic. Since a shallot is basically an onion/garlic hybrid, you couldn’t even notice the difference. Oh, I also didn’t toast the almonds for no other reason than I didn’t feel like it. This was really yummy and I’ll definitely be making it again.
Third: Buttercream Icing. I made a cake (from a box, I admit), so of course I needed icing. (Bonus: I used my new stand mixer! Yay!) Remembering how sweet the cream cheese icing for my pumpkin whoopie pies was, I cut down on the sugar. The recipe calls for 4 cups of powdered sugar, but I used about 3. That was totally the right call — the icing was still sweet, without being OVERLY sweet.
All in all it was a successful meal and I ended the evening feeling a lot more confident about my abilities to cook a meal for more than 2 people! (And lest you think I did it all, Jose gets full credit for the chicken spaghetti — all I did was chop veggies for that one.) Jose and I will have to host a fish night sometime soon — it’s been forever since we had one of those, and we’ve never had one at our house.
p.s. Remember the crock pot recipe I cooked for recipe club, and how I said it was tasty but visually unappealing? Everyone took home plates of leftovers, and apparently at least two of the husbands liked my coconut chicken curry the best! Hooray!
personally i think everything in a crock pot looks unappetizing (for the most part) but is ALWAYS good. I need to post the pics on my crock pot spaghetti i made.
Mmm fish night, you’re on.
It’s funny what you said about cooking for two people v’s lots. For me cooking for manybis way easier, for some reason I always make way too
Much food, use too many pots, and spend way too much time cooking for one or two, for me figuring out how to “downsize” meals is a real challenge.