Niceheart’s Chicken Alexander
12 Apr 2009 Leave a Comment
in Food, Special Occasions Tags: Celebrations, Chicken A La King, Chicken Alexander, Food
I learned how to prepare Chicken Alexander from my girl friend Elaine. It was one of the dishes she served at Maddy’s first birthday celebration and I loved it. This past Christmas, I thought I’d try to cook it and I asked her for a recipe. She gave me the ingredients and the order in which to cook them. Then I also googled “Chicken Alexander recipes,” printed them and showed them to her and asked which one is closer to her recipe. She was shaking her head when I showed her my prints. Well, I’m not very proficient in the kitchen and I need numbers, like amounts and oven temperatures and length of time. 
So this is the version I came up with. Niceheart’s variation means a lot of shortcuts and cheaper alternatives. This is also what I served my family this Easter Sunday.
Ingredients:
1 clove of garlic, crushed and chopped
1/2 of a medium sized onion, chopped
.70 kg or 4 pieces of chicken breast, already boiled, diced or hinimay
1/2 kilo of No Name frozen mixed vegetables (includes carrots, peas, whole kernel corn, green beans and lima beans)
1 can of No Name Cream of Chicken condensed soup, 284 ml (Elaine recommends Campbells brand)
a pinch of salt and pepper
No Name mashed potato flakes – plain flavour , 215 grams, includes 2 pouches
100 grams of mild cheddar cheese, grated (Elaine recommends using marble cheese or two kinds of cheeses for variety in colour)
Saute garlic and onion. Put diced chicken and stir. Add frozen vegetables and continue stirring. (I let the frozen vegetables sit on the kitchen counter for about half an hour before cooking.) Blend in the cream of chicken soup, stirring until the sauce thickens. Season with salt and pepper.
If you want to stop there, that’s actually already a dish called Chicken A La King. But we’re preparing Chicken Alexander today, so put this mixture in a baking dish. Then take the Mashed Potato box and follow the instructions on the box. We will be using the 2 pouches in the box so just double up on the ingredients. It’s just basically boiling water, milk and margarine and adding the potato flakes and stirring until the mixture is smooth. You then layer the mashed potato on top of the Chicken A La King. Put grated cheese on top. Bake in oven at 350 degrees for 20 minutes. Instead of just Plain mashed potato, I used Butter and Herb Flavour this time. It also worked. It added more flavour to the dish.
Feeling the pinch
25 May 2008 22 Comments
in Food, Roadblocks
I don’t think that the price of gas is going down. I’ve been hearing people complaining not just about the price of gas but also the price of almost everything.
Ma-ann from work said that her usual $20.00 a week of gas is not enough anymore.
Libay was also complaining to me on Friday. She and her husband went grocery shopping on Thursday night at Superstore. She spent $75.00 and they only had three bags of groceries. And they didn’t even buy any meats.
I told her that I’ve also been noticing that my grocery bills are going up by the week.
And I was in total shock when I reached the Oriental aisle of Superstore on Saturday to check out the price of rice. Because it went up a few weeks ago.
We consume one bag of this eight-kilo bag of Rooster brand rice per week. About five years ago, a bag of this rice cost about $6.98 and it used to be a ten-kilo bag. Later on, the price went up to $7.98. It stayed there for quite a while. But after some time, the ten kilos became eight kilos, at the same price. It stayed at eight kilos but the price went up to $8.98. It’s been like that for I guess over a year now. And then a few weeks ago, I was surprised that it went up to $10.98. But what can I do? We eat rice everyday. Gotta buy it. And my jaw dropped yesterday when I saw the new price. It shot up to $15.98. Que horror! I checked out the other brands just to compare. The prices are the same. I had no intention of switching brands anyway. We like this brand. It just cooks right.
What about you? Are you also feeling the pinch?
Avocado and Pineapple
18 Jan 2007 34 Comments
in Food
Do you remember my fruit platter from New Year’s Eve? We had 13 different kinds of fruits and it took us over a week to eat all of them. Of course I didn’t buy just one apple or one orange. I bought a bag of each. Except for some of the fruits. The kiwi, I only bought two; avocado, three; and one each of the watermelon, cantaloupe and the pineapple.
This is how I prepare our avocados. First I slice it in half. I take the pit out with either a spoon or a knife. I scoop the flesh out with a spoon.
I add sugar, milk and ice cubes. It’s good.
We don’t buy this often though. It’s not cheap. This was $1.28 each on New Year’s Eve.
Another fruit we seldom buy is the pineapple. We only started seeing pineapples in the supermarket here about five years ago. Before that, the only pineapples my children knew were the canned ones. On New Year’s Eve, I bought only a small one. This was just as tall as my hand, not including the leafy top.
First thing I do is cut the top off. Then I cut off the skin like this.
I make diagonal slits to cut the eyes.
Then I slice them. I dip them in salt even if they are sweet.
Our New Year’s Day 2007
01 Jan 2007 17 Comments
in Food, Special Occasions, Winterpeg
Every year, I always get prepared ahead of time and I buy sparklers (lusis) weeks before New Year’s Eve. But I’ve been too busy with overtime these past weeks and I forgot to buy them in advance. When I did my grocery shopping at Superstore last Saturday, they were out of stock of sparklers. My kids were disappointed when I told them that we might have to skip lighting sparklers on New Year’s Eve. I didn’t want to bum them out so before we went to church on Saturday night, we went to a nearby mall hoping we could find some sparklers. Luckily Zellers has some.
Unlike in the Philippines where there are noise-making and firecrackers everywhere, we just had a quiet one on New Year’s Eve. On Sunday night, I got busy in the kitchen preparing food for our media noche (midnight meal). I made peach tarts, not from scratch, but from this ready-to-bake tart shells and I added canned peach pie fillings. I was going to cook pancit (fried noodles) but the kids asked for chicken macaroni salad. I also made our traditional sotanghon (bean thread/rice vermiccelli)soup.
Speaking of tradition, my post New Year’s Eve traditions, which I wrote last year, has been getting a lot of hits this past week or so.
As I’ve mentioned in my post of January 1, 2005 and January 1, 2006, I follow this tradition of collecting 13 fruits on New Year’s Eve. It is said to bring good luck.
In the picture are: (clockwise from the top left) watermelon, cantaloupe, pink grapefruit, red anjou pears, granny smith apple, tomato, avocado, lemon, red globe grapes, pineapple, kiwi, strawberry, mandarin orange).
And yeah, we’ve had a 30 cm (about a foot) of snowfall on the night of December 30 and we woke up to this on New Year’s Eve.
More pictures of the snowfall next time.
Thanksgiving Day
09 Oct 2006 26 Comments
in Food, Roadblocks, Special Occasions
Today is Thanksgiving Day here in Canada. It’s a statutory holiday so there is no school and no work. Most families here have a feast that includes stuffed turkey with cranberry sauce and also pumpkin pie. My family usually just stays home on this day and I prepare a special meal. We’re not really fans of turkey and pumpkin pie. So instead of turkey I bought a whole roasted barbeque chicken from Superstore. I also made chicken macaroni salad and Jell-O with orange juice and diced apples. (Click for Jell-O recipe here.)
Usually my younger kids would bring home turkey paper cut outs with strips of paper for the wings where they would write down the things that they were thankful for. Last year, Ryland wrote this.
“I am thankful for…
- the food
- my bed
- my eyesight
- that I get a lot of love”
You can read more about this in this post.
Last Friday, he brought home this turkey cut out and this card.
This is the first time I heard of Martin Frobisher. I knew there is some historical event related to the Thanksgiving celebration here in Canada but never bothered to learn what it was until today. I once again found myself googling how it all started.
According to Wikipedia…
“The history of Thanksgiving in Canada goes back to an English explorer, Martin Frobisher, who had been trying to find a northern passage to the Orient. He did not succeed but he did establish a settlement in Canada. In the year 1578, he held a formal ceremony, in what is now the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, to give thanks for surviving the long journey. This is considered the first Canadian Thanksgiving, and the first Thanksgiving to have taken place in North America. Other settlers arrived and continued these ceremonies. Frobisher was later knighted and had an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean in northern Canada named after him – Frobisher Bay.”
And then later on the French settlers who also crossed the ocean and arrived in Canada celebrated with huge feasts of thanks. So did the citizens of Halifax after The Seven Years War and the American refugees who were exiled and came to Canada brought their customs and practices of Thanksgiving here.
“Finally, on January 31st, 1957, the Canadian Parliament proclaimed…A Day of General Thanksgiving to Almighty God for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed … to be observed on the 2nd Monday in October.”
I think Thanksgiving has been set aside so that we could reflect on the things that we are thankful for.
These past few days, I was thinking of something to write for this day. I wanted to write a post about the things that I am thankful for. But it had not been easy because I had been kind of down lately. Once in a while I’d get into this phase where I’d feel alone and lonely in certain relationships in my life – when I’d feel that nobody understands what I’m going through.
And the weather has been kind of depressing too. We’ve seen glimpses of the sun but it has been generally cloudy, windy, cold and gloomy. The wind has blown off much of the leaves on the trees. The pretty leaves that you saw in the pictures in my previous posts are now on the ground.
Then there was this episode on Oprah last week where she had on three suicide survivors. A teen-aged girl who laid herself on the train tracks, a teen-aged boy who shot himself in the face and a mom who was experiencing post-partum depression tried to jump off a bridge. When I watched that I was like, “Oh my God!” I was just at a bridge a few weeks ago taking a picture of the river for a post that I am writing.
But please don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t jump off a bridge. I have been through many trials in my life ever since I was a small child but I never thought nor attempted to end my life. I wasn’t going to post this because I didn’t want people to think that I would ever think of suicide. Oh no. Yes I do get kind of depressed at times but I just love life so much that I just want to go on living even through the tough times.
The reason I am sharing this is because I received an email from a cousin in Manila this weekend. I wrote her to greet her because it was her birthday. She replied and asked me to tell my mother to call hers (my aunt) because a distant relative is sick. And then she ended her email with this:
“Hope you pray for me. I’m stressed and depressed because of many problems at work and my life. Please assist mama in case I won’t be here any more to help her and my son.”
My mother called my aunt and she learned that my cousin is nowhere to be found and she isn’t answering her text messages. My aunt is worried about her. We are too.
Just as the three survivors on that Oprah show are thankful that they are still alive and realize that dark days will get better, I hope my cousin will to. And as I step back today and reflect on these past few days trying to find to write about what I am thankful for, I end this post with what I wrote for Thanksgiving last year. These are still the things that I am thankful for.
“I am constantly amazed at how my children pick up the little things that I say or teach them. I always try to instill in them that they should be thankful for the things that they have.
I, myself, used to fret about things. Like the time I contacted my high school classmates in 2002. I was jealous of their jobs especially this one classmate who is a successful CPA (Certified Public Accountant). I was a CPA back home but I wasn’t able to pursue the career when I migrated to Canada. On the other hand, this classmate, who longs to be married and have kids, was envious of me. I then realized that I have a decent job as a benefits examiner, a comfortable life with my husband and these three wonderful children and I wouldn’t trade them for anything in the world.
In spite of this realization, I still find myself complaining and fretting. About people getting promoted at work and how I am stuck in my position because I chose to work at home. But of course I don’t regret choosing to work at home because of the reasons I’ve mentioned here and in Confessions of a Work-At-Home Mom.
Every now and then, I complain about my twin size bed. About how small it is and how I am always at the edge because my husband hogs the bed. Until I realized that he just wants to be closer to me and there I am trying to distance myself just so that I could get enough sleep (wink). How lucky am I that I sleep with someone who loves me. Some people don’t. How lucky am I that I have a soft (even though it’s creaky) and warm bed. Many people who have been hit by the hurricanes don’t have a bed to sleep on or a roof over their head.”
Once again, I thank Ryland for reminding me of all the things I should be thankful for.
