Pinterest Dinner Week

Last week I decided that I needed to actually make some of the meals I had "pinned" on pinterest. My menu consisted of 4 meals from my "dinners" board. I was sorely disappointed though when I went to make the avocado chicken parmigiana and the blog had been made private. :( Guess someone wasn't happy about their recipe getting posted on pinterest.

So even though I bought ingredients for 4 dinners, I only got to make 3 of them. So here they are, and the best part is all I have to do is link you to them instead of typing out all the ingredients and cooking instructions.

Lettuce Wraps
These lettuce wraps were so tasty and pretty darn close to P.F. Chang's. I only wish I could have found those little crunchy noodle things that Chang's serves their lettuce wraps with. The only thing I did different than the recipe is I used ground turkey instead of ground chicken.

Crispy Quinoa Sliders
 I was a little nervous about Tom's reactions to these "burgers" but I was pleasantly surprised that he really, really like them. In fact, several times throughout our meal he said, "this is really good, like really good."  Bethany was also a huge fan!

I did make a couple changes to this recipe. 1) I didn't make sliders, I made the patties about the same size as regular hamburger patties. 2) I served them on toasted ciabatta bread instead of buns. 3) I omitted the carrots (only because I didn't have any. When I make these again I'll probably add the carrots). 4) I didn't bother with the chipotle mayo.

Slow Cooker Cashew Chicken
Out of the three recipes this one definitely got the least favorable reviews in my house, but it may have been because I didn't really follow the directions. Because I believe that the whole point of a crock pot recipe is to "dump it, and leave it" I did not pan fry the chicken before putting it in the crock pot. I just threw the chicken in frozen. The original recipe said to cook it on low for 3-4 hours. Obviously I needed to add some time because I put FROZEN chicken in but the 7 hours I had it in the crock pot was a little too much which resulted in some really dry chicken. The flavor was really good and if I make this again I'm still going to just throw in frozen chicken but I will probably make sure it doesn't cook for more than 5 hours.

Hope you enjoy.