Another productive Tuesday

After finishing all of my chores, I was super excited to make dinner! My parents have been giving me the green light to cook a little more often and they've admitted that I've gotten much better. I owe it all to Tohchan though! My cooking techniques and sense of taste improved ever since I was prego with the little chef (I sometimes refer to Tohchan as Remy from Ratatouille ^__^). I made chicken & broccoli casserole and brined chicken breasts for the first time!

 

I soaked 3 chicken breasts for an hour in 6 cups of water that contained 4 tablespoons of table salt & 1 tablespoon of sugar. I fried bacon, set it aside, and used the excess fat to sear the outside of the chicken and transferred it to the oven (375 for 15 min, let it rest for 5 min, then chopped into cubes). I boiled the frozen broccoli according to the directions and tossed it with the bacon and chicken. The sauce consisted of a can of Campbell's Cream of Chicken (Cream of Mushroom/Broccoli would be good too! I would've preferred mushroom but we were out :/), 8 oz. of sour cream, and 1 tablespoon of mayonnaise. I mixed the veggies and meat with the sauce, spread it in a 9" x 13" glass pan and covered it with shredded cheddar cheese (the more the merrier!) and cracker meal that I had mixed with butter (use crushed Ritz crackers instead!! The cracker meal is too..well, mealy for my taste). I baked it for ~25 min on 350, but raised the temperature to 400 for 5 min since the cracker meal wasn't browning as fast as I thought it would.

^__^ I started writing my modified recipes down in a journal so that babychan and I will have a variety of things to choose from once he becomes old enough to cook with me!