Florentine Chicken

I love trying new recipes.  This one was originally called Lemon Florentine Chicken but I did some variations to it so I'm just calling it Florentine Chicken. :) 

Here's what you need:

4 boneless skinless chicken breasts

1 can (18 oz) Progresso Recipe Starters creamy Parmesan basil cooking sauce

1 box (9 oz) frozen chopped spinach, thawed, squeezed to drain

2 tsp grated lemon peel

Here's what I did:

The original recipe is from the Betty Crocker website and involved frying and other steps.  I opted to take a different route to make this dish.  I put the chicken in a baking dish, seasoned it, added some pats of butter and baked it for an hour at 250. 

I then added the cooking sauce and the spinach and let it set in the oven while I made some spaghetti.  I did not use the grated lemon peel as I didn't have any on hand.

This is how it turned out

As you can see I served it on a bed of spaghetti noodles.  For me the thing about trying new recipes is that I hope that I'll find one that is a keeper.  For me this recipe was unfortunately, not one of them.  It was a little on the bland side and although it met my requirements for have just a few ingredients and being easy to make it just didn't wow me enough to want to add it to my recipe file.  If you try this recipe let me know how it turned out for you. :)

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Coffee Filter Craft

I am really gung ho for this crafting thing right now and I also realize that it's only January 10th so it's hard to pat myself too much on the back just yet.  That being said I came across several packages of unused coffee filters.  About 6 months ago I had thrown out about 8 packages so I knew that we weren't going to use these either.  I decided to look up on Pinterest things that I could do with coffee filters.

I found a really cute garland so I decided to try it and make something for an upcoming baby shower at work.

Here's what you need:

Coffee filters

Food coloring

Glue gun

Now I had read the instructions on several projects but when it came time to do it I decided to just wing it. 

I gathered the coffee filters, some red food coloring (my project was going to be pink for the baby shower), and a pot with cold water

 

I put some red food coloring in the pot of cold water then added all the coffee filters.  I let them set for just a bit and then wrung them out.  You can wring them out pretty good as they are not too flimsy.  I then tried to just air dry them by leaving them out.  They were taking forever so I put them in the dryer.  Now I checked on them every 30 seconds or so because I didn't want anything catching on fire and they dried really quickly that way.

 

 

Next I took them individually and folded them in half then brought up the other two sides to make the beginning of a flower shape.

 

 

After folding I stapled them at the bottom to hold them together.

 

I then got out my glue gun and started to glue them into a white coffee filter.   

 

 

The original plan was to make a bunch of little flower balls but things didn't go quite as planned.

 

 

The flower didn't look full enough to me.  Hmmm....not sure really what to do as the original plan also included gluing the two of the above flowers together but like I said, it was not looking as full as I was wanting it to.

 

 

So I ended up just making a big flower ball and this is the finished product!

 

 

So while in my mind it was going to be several much smaller flower balls I'm still pretty happy with how it turned out. 

I wonder what will be my next project??  What is yours??

::UPDATE:: 
Here is a pic of how it looked in the break room.  Notice how we took it old school with the decorations by adding the paper chain! 

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Christmas Gift Tags

So one of my "resolutions" for 2013 was to do at least two crafty things a month and so my first project was to repurpose a gift box into gift tags. 

One of my gifts this Christmas came in a super cute box with snowmen, penguins and Santas on it.  I LOVE snowmen so even though the bottom of the box was not reusable I wanted to do something with the top.  I had used some Christmas cards from years past as Christmas tags (not an original idea I know) and figured that I could just cut the box into little squares and make gift tags out of it.  Now it would have been awesome if I had taken a pic of the box before I cut it up but you'll just have to use your imagination but here's the finished product. 

On the left you'll see a larger snowman that was also from a gift box and one towards the bottom that was from some paper.  I'm still not sure what I will use them for but they are ready for some fun future crafting!  :)

What types of crafting have you done lately?

 

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Bacon and Eggs

Now this is a different type of bacon and eggs than you're used to and I got this recipe years ago when I worked at a Kwik Kopy and a lady came in to make copies to send to her relatives.  I asked her about it and she let me make a copy and a few days later also brought me a sample.  They were yummy!

To make your own very yummy bacon and eggs all you need is:

A bag of M&M's (sorting out the yellow ones but of course other colors are fine too)

A bag of stick pretzels

Almond bark

Here's how you make it:

Sort the M&M's and put aside all the yellow ones.  You can also use the other colors too but for the "true bacon and eggs" I use yellow.

Arrange the pretzel sticks (this is the "bacon") two by two on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.

Melt the almond bark (this is the "egg whites") and then spoon out teaspoonfuls onto the pretzel stick pairings.  I usually do about 7-10 at a time. 

Add two yellow M&M's (these are the "egg yolks") onto the melted almond bark.

You can put it in the fridge to set faster or just let them set naturally.  It's a fun little treat that I hope you enjoy. 

 

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