It's Betty with Butter

Okay! Day four... and no heart attacks yet! Last night I made THREE recipes from the book and they were all actually ready and hot at the same time. This is akin to a meteor shower for me, it happens ever so rarely. On the menu were pesto-couscous stuffed chicken breasts, sauteed mushrooms and stir-friend broccoli with mustard glaze. Here is the wisdom (or lack thereof) I wish to impart regarding this meal:

1. Couscous cooked in chicken stock and then mixed with pesto is AWESOME. Like, hard-to-actually-want-to-stuff-the-chicken-with-it awesome. This was a good thing, since I was worried that it would lack flavour given that I was supposed to be using chicken breast WITH skin, but a)I couldn't find any and b) Seriously, Betty, why don't we all just have a shot of melted butter? Urgh. Which brings me to:

2) There was butter in every damn thing I made last night! I was supposed to "grease the baking pan with shortening." Believe it or not, Sunday was the first day I've ever even purchased shortening... (to make the cookies) so greasing a pan with the stuff freaked me right out and I used Olive Oil Pam instead. Good thing too, since you were supposed to dump two more tsp of butter over the chicken while it cooked. I did this, and for some reason, I had myself convinced that what came out of the oven would be brown, crispy and somewhat KFC-like due to the huge amounts of fat on it. Um, it tasted like chicken. There was also butter AND oil in the mushrooms (and lemon juice, which you could taste rather obviously) as well as in the glaze for the broccoli.

3) Mustard-glazed broccoli sounds gross. It is actually so good. Betty knows how to cook broccoli to that tender but still crunchy point and then you throw this glaze on it made up of Dijon, brown sugar and butter. I wasn't sure how this would go over, but Scott and I were both really surprised, it was really good! (Scott ate broccoli without cheese sauce. This is a miracle.)

If I could run, I would have after last night's dinner... it just seemed SO fattening. I'm usually not neurotic about fat grams, but seriously, this was insane. I feel like my skin is softer because the butter is moisturizing me from the inside out... Buh-buh-buh-butter face, buh-buh-butter face.

Tonight I was exhausted, so Scott handled dinner. Perogies with turkey bacon, onions and yes, butter (but in normal amounts). These were not Betty's recipes, so I threw together a salad and made her Honey Dijon Dressing. Yummy enough, it tasted like honey and mustard, which it was. Upside: I got to use the handy-dandy little tool that my sister made her fiance trek to a bazillion different stores for a few Christmases ago. It's the Jamie Oliver (cooler than Betty, sure, and cuter... but beside the point.) gadget where you put all your ingredients into this bottle sort of thing with a ball in it and shake it and it mixes things really well! I felt kind of cool, since I know Betty never had one of these.

So far, so good. The recipes make ALOT of food, so I halve alot of them. My spice rack now has ground mustard in it, which I saw in my mom's pantry for 29 years and never figured out what it was for. I may or may not be doing irreparable damage to mine and Scott's arteries. Guess we better keep drinking red wine. You know, to counteract the butter.

xox