Show Us Your Life- Favorite Dinner Recipe

This week we are sharing our favorite dinner recipes on the Kelly's Korner blog! Click here to share yours!

I have so many favorite meals! I thought I'd share a couple that our whole family loves to eat! 

1) Chicken Spaghetti- I use Pioneer Woman's recipe

Pioneer Woman's Chicken Spaghetti

You can click on the picture to see her recipe. She has such beautiful pictures with simple, step-by-step instructions! 

Here's what I do differently: 

* I use one can of cream of chicken soup and only one can of cream of mushroom soup

* I use just a little bit more broth

* I saute my onion and bell peppers together that way my kids don't notice them and it makes it taste better if my onion gets chopped a little too big 

We gobble this up- it's SO good! 

2) Bowtie Pasta Alfredo- SUPER EASY! 

This is a go-to recipe when I'm in a hurry! 

You can use any kind of pasta you'd like, but I use bowties, because they are pretty easy to cut up. Cook the pasta while you make your sauce! 

You can add just about anything you'd like into the pasta, but here's what I do:  

First, I chop some ham. I just use sandwich meat, so that I can use what's left for sandwiches the next day. I don't measure the ham, but I usually chop several pieces but not the whole pack. 

I also chop up a red or green bell peper. I like this to be diced fairly small. 

I put a little olive oil in a pan along with some minced garlic. Once the pan has warmed up, I add my ham and bell pepper. Saute until the bell pepper is tender. 

Then I melt a stick of butter and pour in one cup of heavy cream. Stir together and add about a 1/2 cup of parmesan cheese and 1/2 tsp of sage. Stir until it thickens up. If it's still too thin for you, add a little bit more parmesan cheese. 

Then I toss this with my cooked pasta and serve! 

I usually have these ingredients in my pantry, so it's an easy recipe to throw together when I'm in a hurry and don't really feel like cooking. 

Week 1 Menu!

I mentioned that one of my resolutions was to simplify by preparing recipes for the week and freezing them. I thought it would be fun to share my menus each week! (Since these aren't really creative meals, I'll skip the recipes for now. If you'd like one just let me know!) 

Saturday was so much fun! We got up and made pancakes. Anna-Kate told me that I made the best pancakes because I made her baby pancakes! haha. (Basically one day she was helping me make pancakes and she noticed that I dripped batter and she thought I had done it on purpose to make her itty bitty pancakes. So now we have to do that every time!)  

After breakfast we got ready and did our weekly grocery shopping. It was a little crazy but we got done just in time for the kids to take naps! 

That was the perfect time for us to make our meals. It took around 2- 2 1/2 hours to make 6 meals. Here's what we made: 

Chili

Shepherd's Pie

Cheesy Tuna Noodle Bake

Ritz Chicken

Vegetable Beef Soup 

Pot Roast (Assembled everything together so we just have to throw into the crock pot and season) 

Bowtie Pasta Alfredo (I was worried the alfredo sauce wouldn't freeze well so I decided to just make this one the night of. It's a very simple recipe- the alfredo sauce takes about 10 minutes to make.) 

We are loving having our meals prepared!  We have an expensive habit of eating out a few nights a week, so having a meal that I don't have to prepare is a lot of help.  Yesterday was a snow day so we chose chili. It was so good! We had Shepherd's Pie. I made the mistake of pulling it out of the freezer a little late, so it was still frozen when we got home. We wound up heating it at a lower temperature for a longer time. It worked but I will definitely remember to pull out dinner the night before! 

The only bad thing that I've noticed is that our meals are just too large. We have about half the meal left over. I even cut the chili recipe in half! We are considering making two weeks worth of recipes and just dividing all of the them in half so we have a month's worth of food. Obviously that would mean we wouldn't have too much variety that month and I'm a girl who loves food...so I'm still just thinking about it! We are just trying to figure things out! 

Anyone have any recipes, suggestions or tips? I'm pretty new to all of this and would love to hear some ideas!