Chicken Bone

Tonight I made a fabulous meal for my girls that they loved - baked chicken drumsticks. Yum!

I first figured out that my kids like to eat drumsticks when I started buying the supermarket pre-cooked rotisserie chickens. When I make chicken I usually only cook boneless skinless breasts, so when I get the rotisserie chicken they love the novelty of being able to hold the chicken bone and eat with their hands.

This week I bought a 3 lb package of drumsticks only (on sale!) and I figured I would make my girls their favorite chicken bones for dinner. I used half the package (about 6 drumsticks) and froze the other half. I love buying in bulk - stockpiles!

The meal was a huge hit - the chicken tasted great and was nice and crispy. I served corn on the cob and baked beans with it. The girls cleaned their drumsticks down to the bone and their corn right down to the cob. That's the type of eating I love to see!


You will need:
1 tablespoon butter or margarine
2/3 cup Original Bisquick mix
1 1/2 teaspoons paprika
1 teaspoon garlic salt
1 teaspoon Italian seasoning
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1 cut-up whole chicken (3 - 3 1/2 lbs)

1) Heat oven to 425 degrees. Melt butter in 13x9 inch glass baking dish in the oven.
2) In a medium bowl, stir together Bisquick mix, paprika, garlic salt, Italian seasoning and pepper; coat chicken with Bisquick mixture. Place skin side down in heated dish.
3) Bake 35 minutes. Turn chicken, bake about 15 minutes longer or until juice of chicken runs clear when the thickest part is cut to bone (170 degrees for breasts, 180 degrees for thighs and drumsticks).

Product Review - Wacky Mac!

Here is a neat product that was recently called to my attention - Wacky Mac Pasta - don't you just love the name? Wacky Mac!

It is a bag of assorted macaroni in all different shapes and colors, so fun looking! As soon as I saw it I knew my girls were going to really go for this, and they did.

They offer Wacky Mac in 4 varieties, Fun Shapes, Veggie Shapes, Veggie Spirals and Veggie Curls. I purchased the Veggie shapes, which is wheels, shells, spirals (rotini) and tubes (penne), in veggie-dyed colors like green, orange, and purple. Cool! My girls loved the variety of all the different shapes and the colors.

I just served this to them plain with butter and melted Velveeta. But Wacky Mac would be great in any casserole or pasta salad in place of traditional pasta. It looks really colorful so it's a great presentation.

Wacky Mac is made by the same company that makes No Yolks, the cholesterol-free egg noodles. Their website is pretty sparse but does offer some information and recipe ideas, check them out at http://www.noyolks.com/wacky_mac_products.html.

Summer food

I have not updated my blog much and did very little cooking in general during the month of July. We are in grilling season now and that means my hubby does the cooking!

Have you ever noticed how in the summer all of the grocery store cookbooks are just not that good or not that interesting?

I am a huge fan of the checkout-line cookbooks and magazines (aka cooklets), I really love to buy these and I rely on them year-round for new meal ideas, but in the summer they all get so lame. You see titles like "Smoothies", and "Grilling". I mean , who cares? I have bought the smoothie cooklets before and they are pretty lame! There are maybe three or four healthy smoothie recipes in the entire book, and the rest are all super sugary ice cream treats like Oreo Mudslide Madness or Key Lime Marshmallow Sugary Concoction. OK, truth be told those sound really good, but I am not realistically going to make this on a regular basis for my kids.

And then the grilling cookbooks - who cares? I am just not into grilling. And do you really need a cookbook for grilling anyway? Don't you just marinate the stuff and grill it? Grilling cookbooks = yawn in my world.

Another cookbook theme I see a lot in the summer is appetizers. I love appetizers just as much as the next person but I am really more interested in solving that daily conundrum of what to make for dinner, like you know, the main course?? Seems like every cookbook you buy has an appetizer section anyway, so it's not like I am not running so short on appetizer recipes that I need an entire cookbook for them.

Even one of my favorite cooking magazines, Everyday Food, does a grilling issue every summer. Normally when I read my Everyday Food magazine I have tons of little folds in the corners and bookmarks noting the recipes I want to try. In the summer issue it is hard to find any pages I want to fold down. And they do a combined July/August issue so there isn't even a new issue to look forward to in August! That's it for the entire summer- that grilling issue is all I'm gonna get from them.

I guess I just have to keep on grilling while I wait for the fall baking and slow cooker recipe cookbooks to be out in September!

In honor of summer - here is a favorite (healthy!) smoothie recipe of mine, courtesy of allrecipes.com.

Mango Banana Smoothie

• 1 banana
• 1/2 cup frozen mango pieces (my favorite frozen mango is the Trader Joe's version)
• 1/3 cup plain yogurt
• 1/2 cup orange/mango juice blend

Combine all ingredients into a blender and blend until nearly smooth. Delicious!!!