Cooking, for a change of pace

Cooking is something which I have not done a lot of lately so after watching the ladies from the county extension office prepare a healthy meal at the Christian Women’s Job Corps, I was inspired. Unfortunately not incredibly inspired, just a little bit inspired, to cook.  So instead of hunting a lower priced store I hit the one on my way home.  There I picked up almost everything that was called for:

• chicken breasts, skinless, .43/lb @ $10/lb, $4.25
• 12 oz of cottage cheese, $2.39
• 32 oz plain yogurt, $2.19
• 8 oz light sour cream, $1.49
• 20 ct santa fe tortillas, $.99
• roma tomatoes  .79lbs at .88 lb,  $ .70
• colby cheese, $2.50
• enchilada sauce, $1.79
• bell pepper, red,  $.99
• bell pepper, green, $1.69
• cucumber, $.50

Ouch. Almost twenty dollars worth of food.  I should see what that would have cost somewhere else but perhaps I do not want to know. So.. on to the meal…

There’s only two of us and the meal serves 8 so my plans were to prepare about half of the recipe. The package size available at the store meant there would be a good bit of leftovers with some of those items. ISo sizing down, for the chicken enchilada dish I used portions of some things:  most of the yogurt is left, half the cottage cheese and the sour cream had nothing to do with the recipes so there’s all of that. Nearly all the tomatoes, half the bell peppers (half each that is) and only a portion of the cheese.

The recipe called for a different cheese, two types actually, I took the easy way out with just one. From twenty bucks our meal is now down to under ten and if I enforce portion size the chicken dish should serve us twice, while the salad will go a good bit more.

The fiesta salad is a mix of canned corn (already had that), tomatoes, cucumber and bell peppers with some seasoning and vinegar. It called for canned tomatoes but I prefer fresh. So there we go. All cut up and ready to eat – when the chicken dish is done in a few minutes! Almost a real meal instead of my usual, there’s some salmon patties, that’s it.

For a similar salad without the simple vinegar dressing visit Big Oven and for a similar enchilada dish check out Cooks.com. I rarely follow recipes precisely and changing things to make them lower fat is easy to do if you wish.