For a family of 2-4, this meal can be made using 1 cutting board, 1 chef’s or chopping knife, 1 mixing bowl, and 1 large baking sheet. You can make clean up even easier by lining your baking sheet with foil.
For this dinner, you’ll need
- 4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts (or comparable chicken strips or chicken thighs)
- 4 medium potatoes, scrubbed and diced (Yukon gold, red, russet – whatever kind you like)
- 1 lb brussels sprouts, cleaned and halved
- 1 Vidalia or sweet onion, large diced (optional)
- 2-4 T good oil (olive, grapeseed, coconut)
For the Marbella marinade, you’ll need
- 4 prunes, chopped roughly
- 6-8 green Spanish olives stuffed with pimentos, chopped roughly
- 1 T capers, chopped roughly
- 1 large clove of garlic, minced
- 1/4 cup good oil (olive, grapeseed, coconut)
- 1/4 apple cider vinegar
- 1/4 t salt
- 1/4 t pepper
The night before you’ll be cooking this dinner, combine all of the Marbella marinade ingredients and whisk to mix well. Pour over the raw chicken (yep, it can even be frozen still); make sure the chicken is one layer when you put it in the fridge. It is super important that you marinate the chicken overnight.
For baking, prehead the oven to 375°F, line your baking sheet with foil and spray it down well with cooking spray.
Toss your diced potatoes and halved Brussels sprouts in good oil and salt and pepper. You can certainly add any other spices you like at this time; for pairing with the Marbella flavors, I recommend lemon pepper or dijon, something with a strong, tart flavor to contrast with the salty and sweet of the Marbella.
Lay out the chicken in a row across one end of the pan, layer the potatoes in the middle in one layer, and layer the Brussels sprouts and onions on the other end of the pan. Pour any remaining Marbella marinate over the chicken.
Place the pan on the upper rack in the center of the oven, and set the timer for 30 minutes.
I LOVE the show and the flavor of a great Japanese hibachi meal, but I don’t have one of those amazing, huge hotplates for making everything at the same time. So I turned to what I know of cooking rice casseroles and oven steaming veggies to see how I could make this dinner easier and faster. Here’s how it goes:
For such a classic cookie, I always start with my Mom’s use-worn Betty Crocker cookbook, where butter is always listed as “shortening.” But I made a few adjustments to let me use up as much of these random ingredients as possible.
Drop by teaspoon-fuls onto a silpat or a greased cookie sheet; for this step, I use one of my few 
When I use all three of my baking sheets at once, I can get nearly all of the dough in at the same time. I had about 1 dozen left for the second round. That’s another great strategy for making cookie baking easier and faster. Works when you’re doing cut out and decorate cookies too!
Sure. It’s just regular Potato Soup with cheddar cheese added, but I just learned that my younger cousins never learned our Nannie’s Potato Soup recipe. I did because it’s my mom’s “sick soup.”
This is one of my favorite soups to do in the crock pot, mainly because my chicken and veggie stock are made ahead and frozen, and I can’t ever remember to thaw them out. Using the crock pot, I can put all but the heavy cream and cheese in at once and set it on Low for 6-8 hours. It takes a little more than an hour for the frozen stock to thaw and cover the potatoes and onions and cook.
My mom likes your run-of-the-mill shaved meat gyro, and we often get our annual Greek Festival lamb dinner for Mother’s Day each year, but for the most part, my family of four doesn’t really do Greek flavors. So when they asked to have the “Greek Turkey Burgers” I’d labeled for the freezer – for me to have as one-offs – I said sure; it was tame enough even for them.
Singing about Cooking 