Flu season has hit our home in full force, so comfort food is on the menu. This chicken and dumplings recipe uses a shortcut that makes it incredibly quick and easy. Making it perfect for days when mom feels under the weather too.

The trick to making these easy chicken and dumplings is to use refrigerated biscuits for the dumplings. Just cut or tear the biscuit dough into fourths.

Another tip that will make this even easier on those days you don’t feel well is to have the chicken cooked and shredded in advance. I like to always have some already shredded chicken prepared in the freezer for quick meals.

So put on some comfy clothes, gather your ingredients, and get ready to enjoy some good, old-fashioned comfort food.

Easy Chicken and Dumplings

Ingredients:

• 1/4 tsp ground black pepper
• 1/8 tsp ground thyme
• 4 T butter
• 1 cup diced carrots
• 1 cup diced celery
• 3 cups shredded chicken
• 4 cups chicken broth
• 10.5 oz can cream of celery soup
• 1 can refrigerated biscuits
• 2 cups water

Directions:

1. Melt butter in a stock pot or dutch oven.
2. Saute carrots and celery in butter for 3 minutes.
3. Add water, cream of celery soup, chicken broth, black pepper, and thyme to the carrots and celery. Stir well and then bring the mixture to a boil.
4. While the mixture comes to a boil, open the can of biscuits. Cut or tear each biscuit into fourths.
5. Once the mixture has come to a boil, add the shredded chicken. Drop prepared biscuits into the boiling mixture. Stir, reduce heat to low, and cover with a lid.
6. Simmer on low for 20 minutes. Stirring occasionally to keep the dumplings from clumping.

Scroll down for a printer friendly version of the recipe or save it to Pinterest so you can find it later.

What are some of your favorite comfort foods? Let me know in the comments.

You might also enjoy:

Kung Pao Chicken

Cream Puffs

Stuffing – Thanksgiving Traditions

The post Easy Chicken and Dumplings appeared first on Many Seasons of Motherhood.

Our family is focusing on making healthier decisions this year. Trust me we are still going to enjoy some fun treats at times too. Since we are trying to make better choices, I thought this month’s cooking challenge would be a great opportunity to teach my daughters about counting calories. This cooking challenge turned into a math lesson, as well.

The Challenge: Make a dinner that is 600 calories or less per serving. 

The Guidelines: 

• Your meal must be $10 or less.
• Each serving must be 600 calories or less.

The Competitors:

• Kelsey, my oldest daughter, chose to make a salad with homemade dressing and baguettes on the side.
• Katie, my youngest daughter, decided on an Italian chicken dish served over zoodles.

They both looked on Pinterest for inspiration and then tweaked things to make their own recipe.

(Some of the links in this article are affiliate links – if you use them you help support this site at no cost to you. Thank you!)

The Shopping Trip:

Kelsey had wanted to make a shrimp salad, but after seeing the cost of shrimp she decided on chicken instead. When it comes to spices and other staples, they don’t purchase the entire item, but instead figure up the cost of the portion they use. This helps them see how they actually DO use math in daily life.

Kelsey’s ingredients were $8.94. Plus she had plenty of salad dressing left, which we enjoyed the rest of the week.

Katie’s meal was $9.26 which came in under budget and we even had sauce left over for lunch the next day.

The Meals:

Katie was up first with her Crock-pot Italian Chicken. 

She wasn’t a fan of cutting up the chicken breasts, but she powered through. I can’t say that I blame her; I’m nearly 40 and still have to power through cutting up meat.

Katie then added the chicken and the various ingredients to the Crock-pot and let it cook on high for 4 hours.

As the chicken finished cooking, she cooked the zoodles in a frying pan with a little bit of oil and crushed garlic.

Then she served the chicken and sauce over the zoodles.

Kelsey prepared her salad and baguettes the next evening.

She started by preparing the dough for her baguettes so it had time to rise. 

While the dough was rising she prepared the salad dressing. She used a copycat Italian dressing recipe. It was her first time making salad dressing. Now that she knows how easy it is, I think she’ll be trying a variety of salad dressing recipes.

After the dough finished rising she formed eight personal baguettes and let the dough rise again for 30 minutes before baking it.

She served the dressing over a romaine salad with diced chicken, cucumber, and tomatoes and served the baguette on the side.

The Scores:

We rate each meal based on presentation, taste, and originality. Three of us were judging so the most each category could receive was 15 points.

Presentation –

• Crock-pot Italian Chicken: 9 points
• Chicken Copycat Salad: 10 points

Taste –

• Crock-pot Italian Chicken: 11 points
• Chicken Copycat Salad: 12 points

Originality –

• Crock-pot Italian Chicken: 13 points
• Chicken Copycat Salad: 7 points

Katie’s Crock-pot Italian Chicken came out on top for this month’s challenge with 33 points.

Counting Calories 

How did they rank when it came to counting calories though?

• Crock-pot Italian Chicken and Zoodles: 350 calories per serving
• Chicken Copycat Salad and Baguettes: 590 calories per serving (We did not add butter to the baguettes.)

Mom’s Verdict:

The Crock-pot Italian Chicken was incredible. I had never had zoodles before and they were surprisingly delicious. I will definitely be working this meal into our family menu. Plus it’s a slow cooker recipe, which makes this busy mom love it even more.

The copycat salad dressing was good, but could have used less oil, which was my fault. My daughter didn’t want to even add it, but I told her to follow the recipe and that all dressing has oil in it. Next time, I’ll let the chef do the cooking. The baguettes were awesome! What makes them even better is Kelsey loves making them, so she is my go to baguette girl now. I have to practice self-control but since she bakes them as individual servings, I can have one with a low calorie meal.

If you think your family would enjoy learning to cook with cooking challenges, be sure to grab my Cooking Challenges Pack.

Do you have a favorite calorie friendly recipe? Please share it with us!

The post Counting Calories Cooking Challenge appeared first on Many Seasons of Motherhood.

Ah, Christmas cookies, one of my favorite Christmas traditions! While baking and eating them can be quite a treat. The actual process of making them, especially with little helpers, isn’t always easy. Over the years, I’ve learned some tips for making Christmas cookies a little easier and I want to share them with you.

Make the dough in advance.

When making cut out cookies, like sugar cookies or gingerbread, it’s especially helpful to make the dough the day before and chill it in the fridge overnight. Then set it out for 30 minutes to soften some before rolling it out.

Freeze cookie dough when you can.

Drop cookies, like chocolate chip and oatmeal, are great for the freezer. Plus you can prepare them a few weeks before the Christmas season gets too busy. Then you just have to pull them out of the freezer and bake them when you need them.

• Prepare the dough as you usually would.
• Then drop the dough by the spoonful onto a cookie sheet or stoneware.
• Put the cookies into the freezer for about 15 minutes.
• Next, remove the cookies from the freezer and place the balls into freezer bags. (16 cookie balls usually fit in a quart size freezer bag.)
• Write on the bag the baking temperature and how long the cookies should bake.

I’ve had great success freezing snickerdoodles and snowballs too.

Prepare a cookie decorating station for your little ones.

• Lay out wax paper or large cutting mats, as a surface for your child to work on.
• Put the icing in little icing bottles. They are perfect for small hands and help contain the mess. Plus they are great for building fine motor skills.
• Most of us have experienced what happens when a young child gets hold of a container of sprinkles. Use cupcake liners to hold sprinkles and candies, to help limit the amount that can end up on one cookie.
• Ice the cut out cookies yourself; then let them dry. Once they are completely dry, set them out with some food coloring markers and let your little artists take over.

Do you have any tips for making Christmas cookies? I love learning new tips; please share your best tips with us!

You also might enjoy:

The post Tips for Making Christmas Cookies appeared first on Many Seasons of Motherhood.

Does your family have any special drinks they look forward to having each Christmas season? Here are some festive Christmas drinks your family will love:

Hot Cocoa

Hot cocoa is pretty special all by itself. If you really want to make it a memorable treat this Christmas set up a hot cocoa bar with special toppings. Here are some ideas:

• Mini marshmallows
• Cinnamon
• Whip cream
• Marshmallow cream (My kids love this stuff! I usually only get it at Christmas.)
• Chocolate chips
• Sprinkles
• Caramel Syrup
• Candy canes
• Crushed peppermints

What toppings does your family like to add to their hot cocoa?

Grinch Punch

This Grinch Punch recipe is super simple. Place a couple of scoops of lime sherbet in a glass. Then add a lemon-lime soda, such as, Sprite. If you would like it to be a little darker green, add a couple drops of green food coloring before adding the soda.

Make Your Own Eggnog

I’m personally not a fan of eggnog, but the rest of my family loves it. My husband and kids have started making their own batch sometime during the season. They haven’t found a favorite recipe yet, but they are determined to find THE ONE.

Do you have a good eggnog recipe? If so, please share it with us.

Wassail

My mom introduced us to this recipe years ago and my kids love it! They look forward to it each Christmas. It’s so easy to make and smells wonderful warming in the slow cooker.

Does your family like any special Christmas drinks?

You also might enjoy:

The post Christmas Drinks Your Family Will Love appeared first on Many Seasons of Motherhood.

My favorite dish at Thanksgiving is the stuffing my mom always made. She actually never stuffed the turkey with it, but made it as a side dish. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that my senior year she offered to teach me how to make it. I still have the little recipe card I wrote it on and have been the person to make it every year since.

The picture doesn’t do it justice. It’s not the most colorful dish to look at on the Thanksgiving table, but it is the perfect accompaniment to the meal in my opinion.

So if you’ve been looking for a great stuffing recipe, give this one a try.

If you like watching videos of recipes, check out the video for this one.

  I hope you enjoy this stuffing recipe as much as my family does.

The post Stuffing – Thanksgiving Traditions appeared first on Many Seasons of Motherhood.

This month’s cooking challenge features an ingredient that our area is known for, green chilies. Each fall our family makes a trip to the farm to have a couple of green chili bushels roasted. Then we come home and spend the afternoon preparing the green chilies for the freezer. It’s one of our favorite fall traditions.

For the most part we use them to make batches of green chili, but they also add a great flavor and nice kick to other dishes too. Which is where our cooking challenge comes in…

The Challenge: Use roasted green chilies in a meal. 

The Guidelines: 

• Your meal must be $10 or less.
• The green chilies can’t overpower the dish but the flavor needs to be present.

The Competitors:

• Kelsey, my oldest daughter, chose to make macaroni-n-cheese.
• Katie, my youngest daughter, decided on a casserole.

They both looked on Pinterest for inspiration and then tweaked things to make their own recipe.

(Some of the links in this article are affiliate links – if you use them you help support this site at no cost to you. Thank you!)

The Shopping Trip:

Both of my daughters quickly realized at the grocery store that they needed to scale back on the original recipes they were going to use. Which explains why they tweaked their recipes. The realization of how much things cost is one of my favorite things about doing cooking challenges.

Kelsey came in right under $10.

Katie came in around $8. Go, Katie!

The Meals:

Kelsey was up first with her Mac-n-Cheese. 

She was in tears after dicing up the bacon and onion. Onions are cruel that way.

After she sautéed the bacon and onion for a few minutes she added a couple of cloves of crushed garlic. Yes, it smelled incredible.

While her pasta shells boiled, she sliced 4 green chilies and heated them in the pan she had cooked the bacon onion mixture in.

When the shells were finished she heated the cheese in the pan. She used jarred cheese dip; she had wanted to use Velveeta, but the $10 budget cramped her style.

Once the cheese was warm she stirred everything together and her meal was complete.

Katie prepared her Chicken and Chili Casserole a few nights later.

She started to prepare her dish by cutting two chicken breasts into cubes and browning the chicken.

Then she used the Pampered Chef Food Processor to easily dice the green chilies.

After that Katie quickly assembled her casserole, mixing a package of cream cheese with the chilies, a bag of tater tots, and the cooked chicken.

Then she baked the casserole for 20 minutes before topping it with shredded Colby Jack cheese and baked it for an additional 15 minutes.

They both did a fantastic job and best of all I didn’t have to cook.

The Scores:

We rate each meal based on presentation, taste, and originality. Three of us were judging so the most each category could receive was 15 points.

Presentation –

• Chili Mac-n-Cheese: 7 points
• Chicken and Chili Casserole: 4 points

Taste –

• Chili Mac-n-Cheese: 12 points
• Chicken and Chili Casserole: 14 points

Originality –

• Chili Mac-n-Cheese: 11 points
• Chicken and Chili Casserole: 8 points

Kelsey’s Chili Mac-n-Cheese came out on top for this month’s challenge with 30 points. The good news is that both meals were great and we look forward to enjoying them again sometime.

If you think your family would enjoy learning to cook with cooking challenges, be sure to grab my Cooking Challenges Pack.

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Do you have a recipe that uses green chilies that your family loves? Please share it with us!

The post Green Chilies Cooking Challenge appeared first on Many Seasons of Motherhood.

As homeschool moms we usually wake up with a check list in our mind of everything we hope to accomplish for that day. With so many things on our plate it’s a relief to have some things that have a smooth routine and run on auto pilot. Take a look at your day. What can you do to have a smoother routine? For our family I’ve found that the tone for the day is usually set around meal times. By clearly establishing a system for breakfast and lunch you can simplify your homeschool day.

BREAKFAST

Whether everyone in your family eats breakfast at the same time or just eat as they wake up, having a plan for breakfast will get your day started right. I like to assign each day a certain meal. This helps with grocery planning too, because I know what foods to have on hand. It also saves me time because I don’t have to menu plan for those 2 meals; it’s already been taken care of.

Here’s what that looks like for us:

Monday is our muffin day because I wanted something super easy to start the week. I make 1 or 2 large batches of muffins when I have some extra time in the kitchen. Then I portion them out in freezer bags and freeze them. On Monday all I have to do is take the bag out of the freezer and clean up is quick too.

Tuesdays I have a little extra time to prepare something but I still wanted to keep it simple. Eggs only take minutes. Depending on what I feel like making, we’ll have fried, scrambled, or omelets.

Wednesday afternoons are busy for my family so it is important for us to hit the ground running. Oatmeal fills us up, which helps us have a productive morning. We usually just use the instant oatmeal packs or I’ll make up a quick batch.

Thursdays we leave for Bible study by 7:30. I prepare breakfast burritos or breakfast sandwiches beforehand and freeze them. Then on Thursday mornings one of my daughters heats enough up for everyone and puts them in the vehicle for us to eat on the go. Frozen muffins are great for this too, because you don’t have to heat them up. Just grab the bag from the freezer and they’ll be ready in 10 minutes or so.

Friday is our cereal day. Personally cereal isn’t my favorite because I feel hungry soon after eating it, but my kids love cereal. There would probably be a revolt if it wasn’t on the menu. I usually just make myself something else.

LUNCH

I have found that if we take too long of lunch break we lose momentum and our afternoon will not run as smoothly. 30 minutes for lunch seems to be the sweet spot for our family. That means that we need meals that are quick to make and clean-up.

Here’s what that looks like for us:

This is how I keep those meals within our 30 minute lunch break:

Burritos – On days I know I’ll have extra time after dinner, I’ll start a large batch of pinto beans in the slow cooker. Then as dinner is cooking or afterward I’ll wrap individual bean and cheese burritos in foil. Another way I have found easy to put away extra burritos for our Monday lunches is to intentionally make more chimichangas and burritos for dinner and wrap leftovers for the freezer. You can even use the leftovers from burrito bowls or tacos to wrap up some burritos.

Pizza – My kids really look forward to pizza day. When I’m preparing pizza dough for dinner I double or triple the batch. From the extra batches I make individual pizza crusts on the grill pan while our pizza for dinner is cooking. Then I put 4 or 5 individual crusts together in a freezer bag. On Tuesdays I pull the crust out of the freezer about 30 minutes beforehand so they can thaw some. Then everyone just fixes their pizza and we cook them in the oven at 425° for 10 minutes.

Soup – I freeze leftover soup in separate servings. Then on Wednesday we just pick what kind of soup we want and reheat it. My little guys aren’t very fond of soup yet so they either have leftovers or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Snack Lunch – Since we are gone during lunch on Thursdays, we needed something we could prepare the night before and have in the fridge ready to take with us. For our snack lunch we pack crackers, cheese, and lunch meat. We usually include some fruit or other treat too.

Sandwiches – Most of the time we make our sandwiches fresh. If you like the convenience of taking things from the freezer though you can always do the same for your sandwiches.

I hope you’ve been inspired to take control of your homeschool days by preparing for them in the kitchen. To help you get organized I’ve put together a free printable that includes more tips, breakfast and lunch ideas, a menu template and a freezer inventory template.

Organize Your

Homeschool Meal Routine

with this Free Printable!

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Now that you’ve gotten some great tips and resources about how to simplify your homeschool day in the kitchen, head over to Beanpost Farmstead and learn how to do evaluations for your child with special needs. She is even  offering a FREE Printable Evaluation Checklist and Evaluation Forms right now!

The post How to Simplify Your Homeschool Day in the Kitchen appeared first on Many Seasons of Motherhood.

Our family is enjoying trying international food during the Olympics. We recently studied China as our “country of the day.” This Kung Pao Chicken recipe is now a family favorite. I hope your family enjoys it too.

The post Kung Pao Chicken appeared first on Many Seasons of Motherhood.

Contains affiliate links.

I’ve been making these cream puffs for years. They are definitely a family favorite and possibly my most requested recipe from friends and family. You can also make them a few days in advance and freeze until you are ready to serve them.

Yes, cream puffs take a little bit of time to prepare but it is a simple process. I must warn you though, once your friends and family have tried them they may request them at every get together.

I hope your family enjoys them as much as we do.

Let me know if you try them.

The post Cream Puffs appeared first on Many Seasons of Motherhood.

I love salsa!

It is probably safe to say that I’m a little bit of a salsa snob.

Depending on how good or bad a salsa is will make or break my opinion of a Mexican restaurant. You know what I’m talking about, right? A good Mexican restaurant will have you full on their delicious salsa and chips before the food ever arrives.

Yet despite my love for it I never could master a recipe that was fabulous. I mean my attempts tasted okay, but even after years of trying I never made a batch that made me think “This is it!”.

Then one Christmas we had a salsa contest with my family and my husband decided he was going to enter. So he practiced and tweaked this and that, and it’s the best I’ve ever tasted!

This recipe is so good that it might ruin all other salsas for you. You’ve been warned.  

The post Our Family’s Favorite Salsa appeared first on Many Seasons of Motherhood.