The Best Leftovers

Most people tell me the best part of Thanksgiving is the leftovers. Well I soooooo agree. A few days after Thanksgiving when we have all had our fill of turkey sandwiches and the rest of the leftovers are about gone, then it's time to pull out my most favorite leftover meal of all. Turkey Pot Pie. Mmmmmmmmmmm.

I used AR's Chicken Pot Pie IX recipe with a few minor adjustments, the biggest being I used leftover turkey instead of chicken. 2nd I used a frozen peas/carrots because that's what I had on hand, I just doubled up the peas only measurement and skipped adding chopped carrots. Also I was out of chicken broth so I had to use water and two chicken bouillon cubes. I also never cut away the extra crust on my pot pies because that's my favorite part! I break mine all up and stir it together and those big chunks of baked pie crust are just so good! Here's the original recipe

Chicken Pot Pie IX

Ingredients

1 pound skinless, boneless chicken breast halves - cubed
1 cup sliced carrots
1 cup frozen green peas
1/2 cup sliced celery
1/3 cup butter
1/3 cup chopped onion
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 teaspoon celery seed
1 3/4 cups chicken broth
2/3 cup milk
2 (9 inch) unbaked pie crusts

Directions

1.Preheat oven to 425 degrees F (220 degrees C.)

2.In a saucepan, combine chicken, carrots, peas, and celery. Add water to cover and boil for 15 minutes. Remove from heat, drain and set aside.

3.In the saucepan over medium heat, cook onions in butter until soft and translucent. Stir in flour, salt, pepper, and celery seed. Slowly stir in chicken broth and milk. Simmer over medium-low heat until thick. Remove from heat and set aside.

4.Place the chicken mixture in bottom pie crust. Pour hot liquid mixture over. Cover with top crust, seal edges, and cut away excess dough. Make several small slits in the top to allow steam to escape.

5.Bake in the preheated oven for 30 to 35 minutes, or until pastry is golden brown and filling is bubbly. Cool for 10 minutes before serving.



Just before I put the top on the pie Mr K. walked by and told me that it looked really pretty with all the pea/carrot colors showing through so I decided to use a cookie cutter on the pie crust so more of the colors showed through when it was done. I didn't have a turkey but found a small chicken in my grandmothers old cookie cutters that I inherited. I think it turned out so cute, If the smell wasn't making me wildly hungry I would have never been able to cut it!


The Colors of Christmas

I usually put our a cheese and meat tray for Thanksgiving. After this years Histo hospital stay and two months of not working money was a little tight this year so I decided to do a cheese ball instead. Only when I asked for everyone's favorite cheese ball recipe on AR I got this cheese ring recipe recommendation. The recipe looked fantastic, it had a little kick and a little sweet so I decided to give it a try. I'm so glad I did. My cousin and I loved it.

CHEESE RING

Ingredients

1 pound shredded Cheddar cheese

3/4 cup mayonnaise

5 medium green onions, finely chopped

1 pinch cayenne pepper

1 pinch garlic salt, or to taste

1 (10 ounce) seedless strawberry jam
1 (10 ounce) package thin wheat crackers

Directions

1.In a medium bowl, mix together the Cheddar cheese, mayonnaise, green onion, cayenne pepper, and garlic salt until well blended. Coat a ring shaped gelatin mold generously with cooking spray. Spoon the cheese mixture into the mold, cover, and chill for 2 to 3 hours to set.

2.Unmold onto a serving plate, and pour raspberry preserves into the center. Arrange wheat crackers around the outside of the ring.

The green onion and the strawberry jam just add such great holiday color to the table. I just love it with this $1 green bamboo place mat I got from the dollar store. I think it really pulls out the color of those onions!

Hope you all had a great Turkey Day! I got a few photos of the food before it was all gobbled up. :) Hopefully I'll have some more to share with you later this week!

Old Mother Hubbard

I have been a little lax on my meal planning lately. How lax? Lets just say I'm supposed to be having Thanksgiving at my house this week and I still don't know what I'm serving, besides the turkey. So last Wednesday when it was time to make dinner I was in a bit of a crunch.

I had sat out a pound of ground beef  thinking I had all the ingredients to make lasagna, I didn't. I also decided I wasn't up to working that hard. :) I didn't really have a lot on hand to make anything! Beings a search on AR seemed to turn up mostly hamburgers, lasagna, and meet loaf I decided dig a little deeper. Both in my pantry and into AR's database. I found dry onion soup mix and decided that might have some nice possibilities. After doing an advanced search where I listed ground beef, and dry onion soup mix as ingredients to search for in a recipe. I found this:

Martha's Vegetable Beef Soup

1/2 pound ground beef

1 (14.5 ounce) can stewed tomatoes

1 (8 ounce) can tomato sauce

2 cups water

1 (10 ounce) package frozen mixed vegetables

1/4 cup dry onion soup mix

1 teaspoon white sugar

Directions

1.In a large pot over medium high heat, sauté the ground beef for about 5 minutes, or until browned. Drain off excess fat.


2.Add the tomatoes, sauce, water, vegetables, soup mix and sugar. Bring to a boil and reduce heat to low. Cover and simmer for 20 minutes.

TIPS for the Crohnies:
I know  lot of us Crohnies have trouble with veggies so here are a few tips to help you get through this recipe.
1. Don't use a bag of mixed frozen veggies. Just use the ones that are OK for you to eat. I actually only had a half a bag of mixed veggies on hand so that's what I used. The rest is part of a bag of peas and carrots and a partial bag of lima beans.
2. Celery - throw it in the food processor and chop it fine then remove any strings the processor doesn't chop up. This is also how I hide both celery and onion from little Mis C in most my cooking.
3. Boil the heck out of them, yes they will be a bit mushy but it will be easier for your gut to digest them. Also all the flavor and nutrients go into the soup broth, so it's not like boiling them in plain water and straining it out. Your going to eat the broth with the soup so you still get both the flavor and nutrients.

Happy Eating!

Food For Thought

Warning this post involves Potty Talk!

Well the blog is called Diary of a Crohnie so you got to sort of expect potty talk don't you. Anywho here's today's Food For Thought.

Did you know canned pumpkin is recommended to help stop diarrhea in dogs.

Farmer B brought me some pumpkins before Halloween. Two of them the kids carved and I roasted the seeds, sorry no photos the Mr. ate them faster then I could get the camera out. We gave one pumpkin to my mother in-law and the Mr. said we were keeping the last one so HE could make pumpkin pie. Then it just sat on my kitchen counter for weeks.

A small confession. I HATE things being on my kitchen counters. When I am sick I am forced to live in a cluttered mess of a home. When I am feeling well I clean like a mad woman because you never know how many days you have before your down again. Right now I'm feeling really well and my house shows it. Leaving something on my counter will nag at me though, it makes me absolutely crazy. So after a few weeks I threw the dang pumpkin in the oven myself and made up a pumpkin pie, even though I hate pumpkin pie, and I thought about dog poo the whole time.



I used Paula Dean's recipe over at food network but substituted my pumpkin puree for the canned stuff. Because of the extra water I baked it a lot longer, putting a pie saver on the edges after the 1st hour to keep them from burning. I also did NOT put in the ginger as I can't stand ginger, and for the first time ever I ate a pumpkin pie that I liked. Beings my Crohn's is in remission right now I have no idea if the pumpkin theory will work for us people, but I did enjoy trying to find out.

My, My, Cherry Pie!



Yesterday Kurt tells me we need to go to Village Inn because it's free pie Wednesday. We picked Miss C up from school and first thing that comes out of her mouth when she gets into the car is "What's for dinner?" I tell her that dad wants to go to Village Inn for dinner and she does an arm pump and says "Oh Yea! Free pie Wednesday!" I think they both watch way to much TV.

 We have a fantastic Village Inn. They have won awards for the being ranked as one of the top rated VI's in the country. Yesterday they completely missed the mark though. Part of the problem was that there were several new waiters and I think a new cook as well. It took over 30 minutes to get our food and before the waiter even put my soup on the table he said he was going to have to take it back and reheat it. Even reheated the cheese soup was so thick they should have served it as a dip with chips!

 Fifteen minutes after we order our meal we are able to flag down our waiter once more and order our pies to go. We also ask for our bill at that time because the man never comes out of the back. He only has three tables to wait on and all three of us are getting fed up with him. Another 15 minutes goes by and he comes out with our bill and tells us that the pie is going to be just a little while because the cherry pie that Mis C ordered is still in the oven. No problem, it will be fresh. So we wait, and wait, and wait.....

  The family behind us comes in, orders their meal, eats it, orders pie. Their waitress tell them there is no cherry pie because it is in the oven and will be another 20 minutes! What!! We snag her on the way by and tell her to cancel our order and change it to apple pie. We haven't seen our waiter in over 20 minutes the people at the other booth near us he was waiting on have the manager at their table and he is getting an ear full.

  Miss C had a bit of a fit but did eventually eat the apple pie we had brought home for her, but only after I promised to bake her a cherry pie today.

 

I used two cans of Wilderness Cherry Pie filling, I added 2 Tbs sugar 1/2 tsp vanilla and 1/4 tsp almond extract. I used a Pillsbury pie crust dough for the pie using a cookie cutter to make the top. I put the pie in the center of the table in place of our usual metal bowl of apples. I'm wondering how long it's going to take her to see it after see gets home from school. :)





Better then Ever

I went to Mayo clinic last week. Met with my GI and ID doctors. My blood work is coming back better then it has in the last 8 years! Amazing what not running to the bathroom all day can do for a girl. I have also gained about 17 pounds!! EEKK! I just can't help it, I can enjoy eating again! Also I needed the 17 pounds but I better not keep it up or they will have to roll me around the house before too long. :)

I have to make a little apologies about today's recipe. It's heavenly, cozy, sweet, with just enough kick to it to be perfect for a cold rainy day like we are having here today. The downfall is it's not a good Crohnie recipe, as it's heavy on the corn and I know a lot of Crohnie's have trouble with corn.

I adapted this recipe from Add A Pinch's Southern Chicken & Corn Chowder Recipe

Chicken & Sweet Corn Chowder

WHAT I USED:
1Tbs Olive Oil
1 Small onion
3 Chicken breasts
2 Carrots
2 Celery Stalks
2 tsp minced garlic
3 pieces cooked bacon
1 cup milk
1 cup heavy cream
3 Tbs flower
4 cans cream style corn
1 can chicken broth
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
Pinch of ground cyan pepper
Pinch of red pepper flakes


What I did

  Over at Add a Pinch Robyn made this on the stove, but of course I threw mine into the crock pot. :) I have a big Hamilton Beach that cooks hot and fast so the 1st thing I did is plug it in and put 1Tbs of olive oil into it. While that was warming up I got out the rest of my ingredients. I chopped the onion up fine in the food processor because the kids won't eat onions if they can see them so I go to sneak them in. Then I dumped those into the slow cooker with the oil & went to work chopping the carrots and celery.

  I liked the look of Robyn's large cut carrots, but a lesson learned, carrots take a long time to cook in the crockpot - use a mandolin and cut them thin, mine were still crunchy when we ate. (We could have let it cook longer but the smell was killing us! We had to eat it now!) I chopped 2/3 of the celery then put the rest into the food processor, again so the kids still got some even if they picked the big chunks out. I dumped this into the crock with the onion and added the 2tsp garlic also. I put the lid on the crock and moved onto the bacon.  

  I fried up the bacon saving the drippings and beings the food processor was already used for this meal I used it again to chop my bacon, saved me from greasy hands. By the time I added the bacon the onions were looking translucent so I dropped in the semi frozen chicken on top of the veggies. (Here is actually where I messed up. I put a full can of chicken broth in at this time also - don't do that! Instead:) Add your cans of cream corn.
 
  Now remember all that yummy goodness in the skillet you fried you bacon in, we just can not let that go to waist. Drop your 3Tsp of flour in there and whisk it until it's good and brown. Slowly whisk in your milk and cream. This gives you a nice thick bacon gravy. I added pepper, thyme, cyan pepper, and the red pepper flakes into the gravy, mixed it well then added the whole skillet full of goodness into my chowder.
 
  This is where you should add you chicken broth - if needed - until your soup is the desired consistency. Set left over broth aside in case your chowder needs more moisture as it cooks. I added my broth first and then my chowder was a little runnier then I like a chowder to be. So learn from my mistakes.
 
  Even with it being thinner then I wanted it & with the crunchy carrots, this chowder was amazing. The whole family gobbled it up!