Cooking Smarter

I complain about food costs but I feel like I’ve become a much smarter, more frugal cook. We’ve never gone out to eat much but now, it happens maybe once every three or four months and it’s always for lunch and never anything fancy or terribly expensive. Chick-Fil-A was our favorite and we can still eat there because they have salads with grilled chicken but I can make that at home for so much less money. I know it isn’t always about the money but it’s hard to spend $25 for lunch for two when I know I could make it as good or better for less than $5 and not have to leave home.

Maybe we’re eating less these days but the last time I bought a package of six chicken breasts, I vacuum sealed each breast in a separate bags except two of them were smaller so I froze those together. Today I was going to make Creamy Chicken & Asparagus. I had defrosted the two breast package of chicken but when I looked at them today, I thought “that’s way more chicken than we’ll eat” so I separated them and will cook the second one for something tomorrow.

That is a lot of chicken for two people . . from one breast and, there was enough left over for another meal.

I didn’t exactly follow the recipe. It says to brown the onions and garlic, remove that, brown the chicken. Why? That sounds like an extra step to me so I browned the chicken, then added the garlic and onions. I also had scapes from our garlic that’s just now putting out scapes so I added some of those. Then I think I followed the recipe the rest of the way, except I added about a teaspoon or so of Italian seasoning.

I served it over cauliflower rice, to which I added a bit of chopped fresh basil.

It was delicious, and quick, one pot, inexpensive to make . . it helped that I have plenty of fresh asparagus and basil in the garden.

I do recommend this recipe and I think it’s good enough for company. It would also be good over pasta.