Food Tuesday: Enchilada Lasagna

Back in Bloomington, my roommate made a delicious enchilada casserole for one of our weekly dinners. The recipe is a staple of hers, and after she shared it with me, I learned that it is in fact called "enchilada lasagna." It's got these tortilla layers, see, kinda like a traditional lasagna has pasta layers? Get it?

I opened up the recipe file this weekend, and although her version calls for making your own red enchilada sauce (chicken stock, tomato sauce, herbs, spices...), I opted to give it a go the first time around using a store-bought enchilada sauce. The result, the time-conscious side of me is happy to report, was very tasty. While I'm sure the totally-from-scratch version is that much better, the enchilada lasagna I made was absolutely nothing to complain about.

Enchilada Lasagna, my way
1. Heat a bit of vegetable oil in a skillet over the stove. Cube some raw chicken--as close to bite-size pieces as you care to get--and toss it into the pan. (I used two good-sized boneless, skinless chicken breasts.) Let the chicken pieces brown and cook through, then remove them to a bowl.
2. Add sliced onion--again, cut to your size preferences--to the skillet and, turning down the heat, allow the onion to sweat for 5+ minutes. Add some minced garlic towards the end, and stir it all together while it sautes for about a minute more before removing the pan from the heat. Go ahead and add the chicken back to the dish to consolidate things.
3. Pour a bit of enchilada sauce in the bottom of a casserole dish--just enough to preclude any sticking post-baking. Layer corn tortillas first so that the bottom of the dish is fairly well covered. Pour a bit more enchilada sauce on top, then spread half the chicken and onion mixture on top of that. Sprinkle about 3/4- to 1 cup cheese (Mexican blend preshredded, queso fresco you shredded yourself... whatever you choose) on top of the chicken and onion mixture.
4. Add another layer of corn tortillas, then pour a bit more enchilada sauce. Spread the rest of the chicken and onion mixture on top, then add a final layer of tortillas. Pour the rest of the enchilada sauce on top before sprinkling another good handful of cheese on top of it all.
5. Cover the casserole dish loosely with aluminum foil, then bake it for about 30 minutes in a 350-degree-Fahrenheit oven. When that buzzer goes off, remove the foil and bake uncovered for another 10 minutes or until the cheese is melted and the enchilada lasagna is bubbly. Let it set for a few minutes before serving.

Last Week at the Library: A Visit from Max

On Wednesday night, Max from Rosemary Wells's well-loved Max and Ruby books stopped by my library!

I tacked Max's visit onto one of my newer programs, a monthly Evening Family Story Time. I planned a few books to share with the audience, and then I had Max coloring sheets and color-able bookmarks set out for kids to work on while they waited their turns to meet Max. I expected a good crowd to show up, but I was blown away by the 147 people--kids and their adults--who crammed into my program room for the event. The kids got to giggling at Max's antics in the book Max Cleans Up, and it was great to have an audience that large really engaged in a story.

The highlight of the event, though, was definitely when Max walked into the room and sat down to meet the kids. Suffice it to say that there were bunny high-fives and bunny hugs in great numbers. Meet Max was definitely a successful program, and it'll be a while before any Max and Ruby books are lingering on my picture book shelves again.

Food Tuesday: Balsamic Chicken and Green Beans

I've had a taste for good balsamic vinegar lately, and this week's #foodtuesday recipe has definitely helped satisfy it. For dinner I made two recipes from the January/February issue of Cooking Light: balsamic chicken with a side of balsamic green beans. I served roast sweet potato on the side, which contributed to a final plate that was colorful, a bit tangy, and delicious.

The most difficult aspect of the balsamic chicken recipe is that the chicken needs to marinate for an hour before you do the actual cooking. I had to plan my timing pretty precisely so that I didn't accidentally end up eating at 8 o'clock. Other than needing a bit more time in the oven than the recipe recommends, the chicken really just consisted of following the simple instructions.

The balsamic green beans were in the magazine as a side for a beef dish, but since I was serving them with chicken I substituted the beef broth called for in the recipe with chicken broth. The soft sweetness of the onions with the tang of the balsamic vinegar and the light crunch of the green beans made for a good combination of flavors and textures; an understated side to the chicken entree.

Another tasty meal, and I hope the leftovers will be just as successful.

Friday Reads: The Penderwicks!

This week I've been spending time with a really spectacular family: the Penderwicks! The Penderwicks inhabit three novels by Jeanne Birdsall, and they make for really fun, charming reading aimed at school-age children. The lady heroines are four sisters: Rosalind, the oldest and most responsible Penderwick; Skye, the tomboy/scientist/explorer; Jane, the imaginative writer; and Batty, the youngest and most whimsical sister. The four sisters work so well as a pack--they even have periodic MOPS sessions, or Meetings Of Penderwick Sisters--but they all have endearing voices and personalities of their own. Their well-characterized uniqueness turns their relatively average day-to-day life into a joyful adventure from start to finish.

Birdsall won the National Book Award for her first novel in the series, The Penderwicks. From there she has added to the lives of the Penderwick sisters in a Louisa May Alcott way, and the end result is an absolutely sunny series of books. I hope there will be more titles to come, but for now there are just the three:

The Penderwicks - The Penderwick sisters, their father, and their dog named Hound head to their summer vacation at an estate called Arundel. While there, the girls make new friends, have daring and dangerous adventures, and get into a pretty good amount of trouble for young girls.

The Penderwicks on Gardam Street - The Penderwick sisters are back home the autumn after their Arundel vacation, and suddenly their normal school lives feel turned upside down. Their father, under some duress, goes on a few dates, causing the girls to fear for their futures and plot to save the Penderwick unite. Meanwhile, new neighbors make for a bright spot in a season in upheaval.

The Penderwicks at Point Mouette - It's summer vacation again, but this time the Penderwicks are separated. Daddy is one place, Rosalind is spending her vacation with a friend, and the remaining three Penderwicks go with their aunt to Maine. The new relationship dynamics of a three-sister clan cause some amount of chaos, but the girls all develop their distinct personalities along the way.

Food Tuesday: Jambalaya

This week I was able to make one of the recipes I had saved to my desktop, thus making for a bit less clutter when I work at my computer: Jambalaya! I first ate jambalaya when I was in New Orleans for ALA Annual last June, and mmm was it tasty. Some time since then, my very excellent mother discovered, tried, and tweaked Ellie Krieger's Jambalaya with Shrimp and Ham into a new staple at her house. When I tasted it while home around Thanksgiving, I knew I would have to give it a go on my own.

I did my own bit of tweaking of the original recipe, namely using chicken breast and smoked turkey sausage in lieu or ham and shrimp. I cut the chicken breast into pieces and cooked it in a bit of olive oil in a frying pan while the rice was cooking in the dutch oven, and then for the last few minutes I added the sliced sausage just enough for it to heat through and begin getting some color. Just before serving, I stirred the meats into the deliciously spicy and savoury rice mixture. Absolutely delicious, and the leftovers potential looks to be quite favorable. Food Tuesday #2 of 2012: success!

Last Week at the Library: Pizza!

This past week, I met with one of my regular moms groups that brings in their young children (about 1-4 years old) for a story time. In these special story times, it can sometimes be a struggle to keep kids engaged for longer than five minutes, especially because of the relatively wide age range. I've found that simple--seemingly too simple, sometimes--programming is what does the trick. Pick a theme with which the children will have at least a basic familiarity, find two or three stories (on the shorter side!) to read, and mix things up with a rhyme/fingerplay and a participation activity. Last week I went with that yummy topic that is familiar to pretty much any American household: pizza!

I read two great, young child-friendly books during the story time: Monica Wellington's Pizza at Sally's and Virginia Walter's Hi, Pizza Man! Wellington's book gives a good nonfiction-style introduction to how pizza is made, while Walter's book is a bit goofy and invites audience response (what would you say if a kitty showed up at your door to deliver your pizza? "Meow meow, Pizza Kitty!" of course!). I separated the two stories with a rhyming fingerplay in which we used our imaginations to make pizzas, and I ended with a color matching game to reinforce color knowledge. Then to the craft: a simple piece of white card stock on which there was an empty slice of pizza, ready for the kids to color or paste their favorite pizza toppings. So simple, using no special supplies, and they loved it! And of course, we ended with the bubble machine--I shall never again underestimate the power of a bubble machine to thrill preschoolers.

Friday Reads: The House of the Spirits

I'm joining a book club next week! As a result, my first #fridayreads of 2012 is Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits, a novel about a few generations of the del Valle and Trueba families in Latin America during the 20th century. This is a dense book, folks; there is so much rich description and detail that it is taking me a while to read it. What I have read so far, however, is definitely rich fodder for book discussion: a mermaid-like girl, a strict Catholicism amidst new socialist values, a bit of psychic premonition, and a cycle of pain and misfortune that seems to circle Esteban Trueba and his family. I'm interested to hear the discussions next week.

Also read this week: Why We Broke Up, written by Daniel Handler and illustrated by Maira Kalman. In the first few chapters, I was annoyed with how self-absorbed the narrator, Min, is while she's listing the reasons she and her ex Ed broke up. She goes through their relationship and the reasons for its demise with the help of small objects she kept throughout their time together--these make up Kalman's illustrations, which are her signature brand of brightly-colored, more-than-everyday portrayals of everyday things. As the novel went on, however, I really got to enjoying the novel despite never really finding Min or Ed very sympathetic. To me, they were just two teenagers who were too self-involved--of course they were going to break up! But maybe that's the point, this is just a close-up look at an everyday breakup, brightly-colored so that for the duration of the novel it's a bit more than just everyday.