Taking after my sis

So MC and I have decided that we are both going to work on developing our culinary skills. Since we watch Top Chef every wednesday, we thought that would be a good cooking night since that show always makes us super hungry anyways. I don't know if I will keep track of MC's cooking or just log what I am doing, but we shall see how it develops. Since we were having a cold spell, we thought that during our dinner and show on wednesday would be a good time to christen our fireplace!

We just made a simple little fire, but it was fun doing it for the first time in our new place and the spinach stuffed chicken MC made was super scrumptious!! And this picture is a bit of a prelude to the apartment post I swear I will make sometime soon. We hope to clean stuff up this weekend and take some good pictures so I can show everyone our new snazzy living quarters.

So thursday it was my turn to do some cooking. We have several cookbooks that we have been perusing a lot lately and two of them I have been looking at especially. The Biggest Loser and Quick & Healthy. Both are really nice because they not only have recipes that are pretty good for you, but they have the nutritional information, which makes keeping the fitday journal up-to-date through our culinary exploration much easier. I decided to cook pecan-crusted chicken from the Biggest Loser book and I paired it with german red cabbage with apples from the Quick & Healthy book.

The chicken was very good and flavorful, though the recommended serving size was a little small (1/4 pound of chicken). The cabbage was definitely on the experimental side. I think I could have used a larger skillet and I think I "simmered" at a little bit too high of a heat. In the book the apple slices looked intact, but in mine they started becoming more like applesauce than apple slices. Overall, it was still pretty good! VERY flavorful, almost too much so. I think having larger pieces of chicken so it would need less of the cabbage as a side would have been about perfect. All-in-all it was a pretty successful meal and pretty good on the health side as well!

Maybe having a set day with something specific to post (like back when I did weigh-in posts) will help me keep this thing a little more up-to-date as well. We shall see!