Monday Menu (November 30, 2009)

Another Monday came and flew by. It was a long day: Bill and I went out to lunch at Chili's. Then we drove around town while I looked for the remaining presents for our advent calendar (I will post in a later blog about that). While we were at Family Dollar our van got hit in the parking lot and the driver side door opens just a little bit. After our store hopping, we did our final shopping at Wal-Mart and because I suffer from ADD, I locked the keys in the van. However, we did not discover this until we were DONE shopping. Now, the van has a safety feature where if you leave the keys in the ignition and try to lock the doors, it won't lock the driver's door. That only works when the key is IN the ignition... So, I called my awesome friend, Laurie, and she came to the rescue. It was COLD and so we sat on the bench next to Ronald. Gotta love Ronald. Between him and the other freaks walking in and out of Wal-Mart, the time just sped by.

For dinner, we wanted to use our leftover turkey and turkey broth, so we made this: Shaker Chicken and Noodle Soup.

However, we made a few adjustments. We did not use the vermouth because we don't use alcohol when we bake or cook. It does not cook out all the way like people think it does.
So the adjustments:
*I didn't add the alcohol.
*I only had 8 cups of turkey broth left over from Thanksgiving dinner so I used Better Than Bouillon and enough water to make it 13 cups.
*I added some sliced mushrooms.
*Instead of chicken I used leftover Thanksgiving turkey.
One thing I would change, I would NOT ADD the parsley. It turned out funky tasting in the soup and I ended up picking it out of the whole soup after we all had our first bowls.

Other than what I want to call the 'parsley incident,' the soup was very tasty. I will make it again.

For dessert, I made a version of Banana Cream Pie I found online. But I used a pre-made Oreo crust and only two bananas instead of four. Also, I know that when making cream pies, that whole milk is a must. I didn't have any, but I did have some heavy cream in the fridge, so 1 cup was 1% milk and the other cup was heavy cream.
I didn't do the final baking that the recipe said because there were comments of people who said they didn't like that. Then when it was chilled, I added a nice layer of whipped cream. We all liked it very much. I have a picture of the slice I cut out and it looks kind of pathetic, but it tasted really yummy.