Week of Mad Cooking Skillz

In a previous post I mentioned making cinnamon rolls for general conference on Sunday morning. Well this morning I had another leftover roll for breakfast and I was again amazed by its deliciousness.

So, I decided these were worth a picture.

"Clone of a Cinnabon"

This morning I spent the majority of my day making lasagna. I've never made lasagna before and since becoming pregnant I haven't really enjoyed meat that much. But, I have an Allrecipes.com account and I keep seeing this recipe called "World's Best Lasagna." It has over 6,500 reviews and was rated 5 stars. So I read a few of the reviews and noticed that some people made two, freezing one for a later date. So I decided to give it a whirl this morning. Let me just start off by saying it took FOREVER to make...and I took the reviewers recommendations to not cook the noodles or the sauce. I only cooked the meat, then mixed all the ingredients for the sauce, and the ingredients for the cheese layer separately. So most of my time was really spent assembling the lasagna. It probably took about an hour and a half to make two half-size lasagnas (without even getting to the baking phase). But it was deeply satisfying to make a huge mess in the kitchen and come out with 2 decent looking lasagnas. I can only hope they'll taste as delicious as everyone said in the reviews! We're having one tonight so I guess I'll know soon.

Yum! It was delicious. Maybe a little too much meat for my taste, but other than that it was pretty tasty!

Yesterday I was also feeling rather adventurous in the kitchen, so I tried out this recipe I found floating around on Pinterest--it's from a blog called Kayotic Kitchen and the recipe's "Kaytucky Chicken." I made this a few months ago and loved the concept but wasn't really a fan of the cream cheese/bacon/parsley mixture so I've been trying to come up with something more to my liking. And yesterday I found it! Thanks to my mom I have several boxes of Stovetop Stuffing, so I decided I'd make a Thanksgiving-y Kaytucky Chicken. I used her same recipe, but put the stuffing in the chicken and a few spoonfuls of cranberry sauce then closed it up and wrapped in the puff pastry shells. I'm still not the biggest fan of meat right now, but small amounts of the chicken with the pastry and stuffing were delicious. I'm actually eating the leftovers right now for lunch. If I ever attempt this again, I'm going to try to marinate the chicken or use a seasoning rub on the chicken because  even with the pastry and stuffing, the chicken is pretty bland. But all-in-all I'd give this meal an A-

This picture really doesn't do it justice, but it's tasty! Next time I'll have to go all out on the Thanksgiving idea and make some green bean casserole and sweet potatoes for the sides. Yum! Thanksgiving dinner is my favorite meal!