Day 5, Thumbs up AND down! Chicken and Sweet potatoes

Last night's dinner was all from a book. I found a super easy chicken meal--seemingly fast to prepare--so i decided to add a side-dish to it! Ooooo Getting fancy. I know :)

The chicken was easy. It was called Mozzarella Chicken

I lined a baking pan with my boneless chicken breasts (nasty things to touch when they are thawed and raw) though the book said i could have left them frozen too. And i topped them all with Cream of Chicken, cheese (didn't have mozarella, so i used colby-jack), and bread-crumbs :) oh, and some little butter chunks too. Kindof fun to make.

Since i didn't have official store-bought bread-crumbs, i toasted up 4 pieces of bread and then crumbled it. Seemed logical enough a replacement, right? And then in the oven it went!

VERY yummy dish. Cooking it with the Cream-Soup helped the chicken stay super moist too (which is good, cuz i'm not very talented at that on my own). 40 minutes on the timer.

And, ironically enough, my side-dish also wanted 40 minutes at the same temperature! So, the goal was to put them in at the same time and they'd be done together! Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out that way.

The side-dish was a Sweet Potato Souffle'. The big picture right next to it looked yummy, and the prep seemed simple enough, so i had at it.

I used 2 huge yams and a bunch of other normal kitchen stuff: salt, sugar, flour, eggs, milk, butter... oh and sum nuts to make it cool :)

Well,i ran into a problem with the brown-sugar. Mine was SOOOOOO hard that even a sharp knife and a ticked off black-belt couldn't get through the brick chunks. It took me a good twenty minutes before i finally gave up. I called around and found out that i can use white-sugar just the same and it should still turn out. maybe. One glance at the mocking chunks of brown-sugar staring up at me from the trash convinced me to give it a try though.

So, it ended up taking the entire 40 minutes (while the chicken was already in the oven) just to get the darn Sweet Potatoes ready. Which sucked cuz i was trying to time everything for when james got home. See, last week i was too anxious about it and the food was prepared too early and would get cold. LOL Now i timed things better, but about pulled out my hair trying to get it done. Need a better balance in this. !!!!

So, dinner on the table. Served it all with some rice too. The funny thing is that both the dishes ended up looking similiar. LOL Was unintentional.

Four thumbs WAY WAY up for the chicken. Yum. But, for the S-Potatoes? AAAAAAAK They were extremely sugary. Extremely! I couldn't finish the ones on my plate, so they got thumbs down from me. James gave them one thumb partially up, but even he only ate a tiny tiny portion.

I checked the recipe again today, and i did everything right. For only having 4.5 cups of potatoes, it asked for a cumulative total of 3.5 cups of sugar! Now that i think about it, that's like literally half sugar! GAG It should have been listed under the death-by-dessert section, and not the side-dishes.

to give you an idea of exactly how sugary this thing was? I took 2 bites of the stuff and then ate my entire piece of chicken instead. On the last bite of my chicken, i was STILL tasting the sugar! It totally over-powered the flavor of everything else.

I'd like to try the dish again sometime, because i think it "could" be really yummy. But with at LEAST half the sugar. !!! So, now what do i do with an entire dish full of left-over sugar loaf? :)


anxiety level last night: higher than it needed.

experience so far: I asked james last night if there was any dishes he wanted repeated during this next pay-day cycle, or if he just wanted me to keep finding new ones. His request? Although everything is a total repeat (minus the s-potatoes from tonight), he asked for the Fried-Bread!

Question: Does anyone know the rules of posting recipes here from a cook-book? How much of the process am i allowed to share?


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