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Hi.

Welcome to Lattes, Life & Luggage! I’m Christine and I share my adventures traveling and navigating this crazy thing we call life.

Cooking With Stanley Week 36

Cooking With Stanley Week 36

Cooking With Stanley this week is a great fall meal that has a ton of veggies. What I love about it most was how easy the cooking process was this time around. There was prep, stove work and then everything went in the oven for a while which gave me time to clean up, do any dishes I made while cooking and get ready for everyone to come over. There wasnt a rush to make sure everything was ready while cooking several things in there different places. I enjoyed the change of pace. Here is the menu for this week. 

MENU
Lasagna made with Polenta and Gorgonzola Cheese
Chicken on a Brick with Lemon and Rosemary
Vegetable Casserole

Funny story about my lasagna. First of all, there aren't a lot of polenta eaters in my family so I halved the recipe not wanting a ton of leftovers or it to go to waste. Second, I was already using my square baking dish for something else. I tried using a round pie dish instead. Everything was totally fine until I started cutting the polenta up. It just turned into a hot mess so I put everything back in the dish and shmooshed it back down. Instead of lasagna we had polenta topped with cheese and sauce. It still tastes the same, no big deal. One substitution I made was the cheese. I am not a fan of Gorgonzola so instead I took one of Stanley's other recommendations and used one of my personal favorites, gruyere. It turned out fabulous. I really enjoyed it and I even had the leftovers for lunch the next day. 

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The Chicken on a Brick was a hit. The recipe calls for a three pound whole free range chicken. Let me be perfectly clear, I do not like working with whole carcasses. It grosses me out and I feel really uncomfortable when there are a ton of bones involved, especially if I have to remove them. So naturally I got the next best thing, a cut up whole chicken. It costs much less than a whole chicken and it's much less messy. I also didn't need to use a brick so that was another plus. The marinade for this is spot on. A little wine, a little lemon zest, herbs, red wine vinegar and a few other things give you a juicy, flavorful chicken. I did the baked version of this dish and it worked out perfectly. I highly recommend it especially since the chicken gets to sit in the marinade as it cooks. It just makes it that much juicier and the flavors don't get lost. 

The vegetable casserole is a bit tedious in the prepping process but for a good reason. The recipe calls for each of the vegetables to be sautéed separately before put into the casserole dish so that none of the individual flavors of the vegetables gets lost. Afterwards they're all tossed in marinara and topped with cheese. Amazing! Even The eggplant was good and I am not one for eggplant. This would make a really great light lunch. Hello leftovers! 

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