First Sentences and First Recipes

I've been suspecting that the boy spends way too much time surrounded by little dogs. Yesterday, this is where he chose to take his nap:

That's right, he grabbed his Boppy, dragged it into the freaking doorway, and curled up for a nap. Completely in the way and completely underfoot, just like certain other little dogs that I know. The next clue came this morning, in the form of his official first sentence: "BAD DOG!!!"

Um, yeah.

I guess I yell at my dogs a lot. He's been going around the past couple weeks yelling "BAD!!!" at them and if he could get close enough, smacking them on their behinds. It's pretty funny. I of course have to try not to laugh and remember to tell him to be nice to the dogs. Gotta be setting the good example, right? I just about died laughing though when I heard his cute little voice admonishing them this morning.

Today was all about the groceries. I went three days without eating anything processed, with the exception of some organic cheese tortellini that I fixed for lunch yesterday. I'm not about to make tortellini from scratch anytime soon. I tossed the pasta with some of my leftover tomato sauce and peas. It was the best meal the boy ate all week! He's been really picky lately, boo toddler eating habits.

Anyway, last night I heard that it was the last night for Dairy Queen's buy one get one for 25 cents Blizzard deal. I haven't had a Blizzard in AGES, probably since I was pregnant, so we decided to go. Let's just say that your body must get used to clean eating really fast, because I paid for that Blizzard and all of it's processed, artificially flavored goodness with a killer stomachache. Lesson learned - hopefully.

So this morning, I busted out my copy of Jamie's Food Revolution, and some mini post it notes, and started to flip through the book. Each page that looked like something that I might eat got a little pink flag. I picked out the first six recipes that I marked and made out a grocery list. I even got myself a wok!

First up: Chicken and Leek Stroganoff.

The only stroganoff I've ever eaten was the traditional beef stroganoff with egg noodles and sour cream. I really like beef stroganoff. All Jamie's recipe had in common with that one is that it contains mushrooms. That being said, you gotta know, it's really good! All three of us loved it, including picky toddler man. I think that Jamie's full of crap when he says this recipe will only take 19 minutes to prepare, but you can definitely get it done under thirty.

I did make a couple of alterations to the recipe. I used chicken broth in place of the white wine, because I didn't have any white wine in the house. I also skipped the basmati rice, because we had short grain rice in the freezer already (we make extra and it freezes remarkably well) so we just used that. I went with the crimini mushrooms because the oyster ones looked scary when I finally found them at my local Asian supermarket. I also used two leeks instead of one because I wasn't sure if they were large or medium sized. This is only the second time I've cooked leeks before so I'm still a little clueless. They taste good so no one seemed to mind.

This made a LOT of sauce, which kind of annoyed me at first. It's good with the rice soaking it up though so it's not a problem at all in the end. I think I will definitely be making this dish again in the future. It was pretty easy, pretty quick, and really tasty.