Rachelle's Weekly Meal

So this week we made my good friend from high school Smittay's Super Easy Goloush.  I personally loved it and so did Andrew, the older boys weren't so sure of it but I am going to try it on them one more time before I give up, hubby was not here to eat with us for our meal this week.  Total cooking time was 30 minutes and I felt this was an easy meal to make. 

This week I did most of our shopping at the commissary the cost of this meal for me was:

Ground Beef:  $2.38 for 1.31pounds

Mushrooms: $2.19 for the 8oz

Onion : $1.29 a pound

Vegetable Beef Soup: $1.29

Cream of Mushroom Soup: $0.67

Milk was on hand along with the spices.

So my total cost to buy this week for the meal was $7.82.

The recipe is:

Smittay's Super Easy Goulash

1-1.5 lbs ground beef (turkey if you wanna go healthier)
1 pack mushrooms sliced
1/4 - 1/2 cup diced onions
1 can campbell's vegetable beef soup
1 can campbell's cream of mushroom soup
1-2 cups milk
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp salt
2 tsp pepper
2 tsp johnny's seasoning salt
1 tsp chopped garlic

Add ground meat to pan with seasonings and garlic. add mushrooms and onions when the meat first starts to brown. Finish cooking/browning meat. Remove all grease, I prefer to dump all the meat out onto paper towels and pat dry, then wash the pan. Return meat to pan, adding vegetable beef and cream of mushroom on med low. stir until all is incorporated. Add milk until desired thickness ( I like it to be a Little bit runny as it will thicken a bit once it starts cooling). season with additional salt,pepper and johnny's to taste. serve over white rice or mashed potatoes or toast. canned green beans or corn goes great with it too :)  

January 9th Dinner

Tonight's dinner, as I said earlier, was goulash. I started cooking at around 5:30pm and it was finished at about 6:15. Neither myself nor my guests have ever had goulash before so it was quite a treat. I loved how easy it was to throw together. Had I already known the ingredients for the recipe I probably could have cooked it in about 20 minutes.

Everyone loved it! They even went back for seconds! I served it on white rice (not the brown rice I had originally planned due to cooking time) which worked well. We also had corn on the cob and dinner rolls.

-Laura

Shopping Trip for Jan 9th Dinner

Tonight's meal will be Goulash. The recipe was donated by Aaron Smit.

Here are the numbers for my shopping trip!

From Costco:
Ground Turkey - $3.63

From Safeway:
Yellow Onion - $0.89
Campbell's Vegetable Beef Soup - $1.49
Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup - $1.49
Milk (1 to 2 cups) - $0.26/cup
1 Head of Garlic - $0.50

Total: $8.52

I already have:
Paprika
Johnny's Seasoning Salt
Salt
Pepper

With the meal I will be serving brown rice and dinner rolls.

The dinner rolls were $2.49
The brown rice was $5.21

-Laura

Cost of the first meal in Wisconsin

So here is what it cost to make the Easy Cheesy Potato Casserole for me shopping at the Wal-Mart Supercenter in Tomah, Wisconsin:
The 2 pounds of frozen potatoes cost $1.88
The Onion was $.88 for a whole one but we only used one so $.44
The Celery was $1.79 for a whole bunch of it but we only used one stalk there were 10 in it so about $.18
The Cream of Celery soup for store brand which is what I used was $.92
The Sour Cream which was cheaper to buy Breakstones of was $1.42
The Butter I got 4 sticks for $2.99 so about $.75
Salt and Pepper we already had on hand
We used the potato chips which were $1.98 for an entire 11 ounce bag, we only used 1 1/2 cups though which ended up being approximately just over 2 ounces which cost $.32
Casserole Grand Total = $5.95
Green Beans were $.76 a can at the commissary
Biscuits were $.99 a can at the commissary
Chicken was leftovers from our New Years get together.
Entire Meal Grand Total = $7.70 to feed an entire family of 5 last night!

Happy Cooking
~Rachelle

January 2nd - Laura's First Dinner Challenge

I would have to say that this meal was a success.....minus a minor problem I had. Apparently I didn't thaw the potatoes long enough so instead of taking an hour to cook, the potato casserole took about an hour and a half. Everyone seemed to love it though. I served the casserole with some crockpot chicken on brown rice and garlic bread.

The recipe for the chicken was supposed to give me chicken breasts but while it cooked in the crockpot the chicken started falling apart so it ended up as more of a chicken soup. My guests decided that it worked better having the chicken shredded instead of breasts though. Also, in case you decide to make the chicken, it cooked much faster than the 8 to 10 hours the recipe told me. It was done after about 5 hours so I put it on warm until about 30 min before we had expected to eat.

Thank you Ashly for this recipe. It was delicious. I am curious though how it will taste with your boiled potatoes and may have to make it at a later time like that.

Rachelle's Meal for January 2nd, 2011

So today we made up a good friend of mine, Ashly's Cheesy Potato Casserole.  It was a success here minus one of my sons but he is going through a no potato stage right now so that was to be expected.  All together it took me 15 minutes to prepare between dicing up onion and celery and grating cheese and then mixing everything up.  After that it was a very easy recipe because you just put it in the oven for an hour.  We served it today with green beans, chicken and biscuits which complimented it nicely.  My husband was a big fan and wants to make them a possible breakfast dish.  The recipe we have right now uses frozen southern-style hashbrowns, which I intend to next time make homemade after figuring out how to do so.  I used potato chips on top as we are not big corn flake fans around here. 

The Recipe is:
Ingredients

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• 1 bag (2 pounds) frozen southern-style hash brown potatoes shopping list
• 1 cup finely diced onion shopping list
• 1/3 cup finely diced celery shopping list
• 1 can (10-1/3 ounces) condensed cream of celery soup shopping list
• 1 carton (16 ounces) sour cream shopping list
• 8 ounces cheddar cheese, shredded shopping list
• 1/2 cup (1 stick) butter or margarine, melted shopping list
• salt and pepper to taste shopping list
• 1-1/2 cups crushed potato chips or cornflake crumbs shopping list

How to make it

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• Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a 2-quart casserole or 9-inch by 13-inch baking dish.
• Thaw the potatoes just enough to break them apart. Combine in a large bowl with the onion, celery, soup, sour cream, Cheddar cheese, melted butter, and salt and pepper to taste. Mix well. Spoon into the baking dish. Top with the crumbs. Bake for 1 hour. Serve hot.


Enjoy your week!
~Rachelle

Side dish conundrum

Alright,

So as I mentioned in my previous post, I needed a side dish to go with my cheesy potato casserole. while in the process of deciding what I would be cooking with it a few of my friends decided that they wanted to join in on the taste testing for tonights dish. With that said, I now needed something that could feed six people, myself included. I decided chicken would be a good choice so I started looking around the Internet for chicken recipes and came across a crockpot chicken recipe complements of bigoven.com.
So alas, I had yet another shopping trip to do before tonights big dinner. The recipe calls for worcsterchire sauce which, due to a fish allergy from one of my guests, I replaced with soy sauce.I also replaced the cream of celery with cream of chicken and the mushrooms with green beans. I decided to do my shopping at albertsons so here are the numbers:

Keep in mind, these are only the things that I actually needed to buy. Everything else i already had in my kitchen.

Cooking Sherry: $3.49
16oz Frozen Green Beans: $2.19
6 Chicken Breasts: $10.28

Total: $15.96

Here is link to the recipe for the chicken if you would like to take a look:
http://www.bigoven.com/recipe/28007/baked-chicken-breasts-crockpot-to-die-for

The chicken is now cooking in the crockpot so we shall see how it will turn out tonight!

Laura