HG recipe review #3: Tasty Taquitos

It's Hungry Girl recipe review time, and this month Jenn and I decided to make HG's Exploding Chicken Taquitos. The taquitos you can buy in the store or at a restaurant are a fast, tasty treat, but they're also typically fried and rather fattening. Hungry Girl's version called for canned 98% fat-free chicken, non-fat cheddar cheese, salsa, a little bit of taco seasoning, and yellow corn tortillas. It's a pretty easy recipe to follow: mix together the chicken, salsa, cheese and taco seasoning and let refrigerate for 15 minutes. If there's any liquid in the filling, you drain it out after refrigerating. You then roll the filling into the tortillas that have been sprayed with cooking spray, bake them up, and voila! You have your very own non-fried version of chicken taquitos.

They're called "Exploding Chicken Taquitos" because when you bake them, the filling might crack the tortilla and seep out a bit. That happened with one of our taquitos. Here is a picture of the finished product, which we ended up having with some rice and corn for dinner:




I had to make a variation on this recipe because the yellow corn tortillas were more expensive than the white corn ones, so I used white corn tortillas. Also, I couldn't find fat-free shredded cheese in the grocery store (the cheese aisle was especially busy that day because of a huge sale on shredded cheese), so I just used the 2% milk kind.

The result was great. Tony said this was the first Hungry Girl recipe I've made that was an acceptable substitute for the "real thing." We really enjoyed these and would recommend them to anyone. My own qualm is the ingredients for this can be kind of expensive. I think in the future I would use regular chicken that I have on hand and stick with whatever corn tortillas were the cheapest.

Overall rating: Four out of Five stars.

For next month, Jenn has chosen HG's Cheesy Butternut Bake, which features butternut squash, Laughing Cow cheese, onions, egg substitute and a variety of spices. I'm excited to give it a try!

House hunting update

Well, we found a house we really liked when we went house hunting earlier this week. It's a very cute old house located in the Florence area. It has some neat built-ins throughout, a good-sized kitchen, 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a garage, a wonderful backyard with a secret garden, all of the appliances, new furnace & a/c, and a whole lot of potential. We went on a second walk-through on Wednesday night and then decided to meet with our real estate agent to put in an offer yesterday. We offered them almost full asking price (they had already reduced the price $9,000) and asked them to pay our closing costs, fix a few things on the outside, and provide a one-year home warranty. After talking to the selling agent, we thought there was a chance they would like our closing date (at the end of Feb. because of our lease and the fact that we want to use our tax return as our down payment). The woman who has owned the home (for the last 53 years) is now living in Texas, but all of her stuff is still in the house. However, they didn't accept any part of our offer. They said that if we wanted them to pay closing costs they would raise the price of the house by $3,500, and if we stuck to the closing date they would keep the house on the market. That means there would be no guarantee we would get it - they could accept another offer at any time. We decided to walk away. We hope the house will still be on the market at the end of December or beginning of January, when we might put in another offer. In the meantime, we'll keep looking to see what else is out there. We are kind of disappointed, but we are learning a lot from this home buying process. Things will work out as they should!

Tomorrow is Hungry Girl review day! I actually think I might make the taquitos tonight for dinner, but I'll hold off on posting the review until tomorrow.

Happy Weekend!

-Meredith

HG Review #2: Cheesy goodness? Not quite.

This is the second month Jenn and I have done a Hungry Girl review. This month's recipe: HG's Fiber-rific Mozzarella Cheese Sticks. Who loves fried cheese? I do! I do! I was looking forward to giving HG's non-fried substitute a try. This simple recipe calls for FiberOne cereal crumbs, egg substitute, seasonings, and low-fat mozzarella cheese sticks.

I blended up the FiberOne cereal in the blender to make the "crumbs." It took a little bit of time, and in the end I still had some chunks in my crumbs, but that didn't end up being such a big deal.

I then double-breaded the cheese sticks (cut in half) with egg substitute and seasoned crumbs, placed them on a pan, and put them in the oven to bake for a little less than 10 minutes.

I didn't quite catch them just as they got done, so my finished product didn't look as good as it could have. Paired with some tomato sauce, Tony and I gave these a try:
The melted cheese part was good, as was the sauce. What wasn't good for me were the cereal crumbs. Good idea in theory, but bad in practice. The cheese sticks tasted distinctly of cardboard-flavored cereal. Tony said for him the breading brought the cheese sticks down to the level of an unacceptable substitute. He wouldn't eat this recipe again. I think I would make this recipe again but use Italian-seasoned bread crumbs instead of seasoned FiberOne crumbs. I can't imagine that using real bread crumbs would increase the fat and calorie content by that much. What really makes this recipe healthy is the fact that these are baked and not fried. Overall rating: Three out of five stars.

Next month we will make HG's Exploding Chicken Taquitos. Yummy! (I hope!)

Hungry Girl Recipe Review: Old Time Rocky Road Fudge

So my wonderful sister-in-law, Jenn, and I have decided we are going to review a recipe from Hungry-Girl.com every month on our blogs. This month we decided to make Old Time Rocky Road Fudge, a recipe that uses only a handful of ingredients: brownie mix, canned pumpkin, light chocolate syrup, marshmallows and slivered almonds. You can find the full recipe here.

I have to say, I was very excited about making this. I am a real chocolate lover, and I was having such a strong craving for chocolate that I decided to make these a day early. (Sorry, I cheated, Jenn!) So I gathered up the ingredients, along with my helpful husband and assistant:
We started by mixing up the batter. We used regular chocolate syrup instead of light chocolate syrup simply because that's what we had in our fridge (and I didn't feel like buying the light kind just for this recipe). This is what we got:


Tony was the first to taste the batter, which was very smooth and quite thick. He said it tasted like "poo." I tried it, and I didn't think it was great, but not terrible either. I started to worry that I had wasted a perfectly good brownie mix. But we went ahead and baked up the batter, as directed. We then removed it from the oven, put the marshmallows and nuts on top, and baked it a while longer.

I was so excited to try this, but after reading the directions I realized the fudge had to chill for "several hours"!!!! I was craving chocolate right then, and so was Tony (to a lesser degree) so we settled for other snacks until our fudge was chilled. I had a make-shift "banana boat" (which turned out to be entirely too sweet (bad idea, me)) and Tony had hot chocolate.


After several hours had passed and the fudge was thoroughly chilled, I tried a piece:

To my surprise, my attempts to satisfy my chocolate craving were thwarted, once again! My expectations for this recipe were very high, and so I was very disappointed. While the texture of this was fudgy (but a little soft... more like pumpkin pie) the pumpkin flavor totally overwhelmed the chocolate. Actually, to me, it doesn't taste like chocolate at all. I had another couple of pieces today before blogging and decided that this recipe doesn't taste bad, but it doesn't taste like chocolate fudge. Tony had another piece today, too, and agreed that the pumpkin overpowered the recipe. I would much rather eat a small amount of real chocolate fudge and deal with all those calories and fat than eat this substitute. And so, for me, this gets a thumbs down. Out of 5 stars, I would give this 1 1/2 or 2.

I like what Hungry Girl is trying to do with her recipes, so I'm looking forward to next month's review!