Easter Meal Preps

 Chad and his family will be here tomorrow (Easter Sunday) so I decided to do as much as I could in the kitchen today (Saturday). 

I spent almost the entire day in the kitchen.

Using magic tape, I taped the four recipes up where I wouldn't have to be constantly picking them up or moving them out of the way. I planned to make Jalapeno Raspberry Chicken, Rolls, Lemon Blueberry Cake and Mac & Cheese.

A while back I had seen a receipt for Jalapeno Raspberry Chicken and have been wanting to try it for over a month. I decided this was a good time, except neither Chad, Nicole or Addie will eat jalapenos and finding jalapenos at any of the Walmarts around here has gotten to be a challenge lately. I had a few still in the fridge from Aldi so I used those and made one batch of sauce for Vince and me and one batch of sauce for them.

Below is a photo of the seasoned chicken thighs along with two separate jars of sauce. There's also a dish of mac & cheese. Tomorrow I will put the topping on the mac & cheese (Panko, grated Parmesan, melted butter and paprika) and bake it.

Next thing I stirred up was the rolls. This recipe is super easy and they can be shaped into hamburger buns too. I had planned to let the dough sit while Vince and I ate lunch, then shape them into rolls, put them in the fridge and tomorrow, I'll take them out, let them rise and bake them but the rolls were rising way faster than I expected. I guess I need to get used to the kitchen being warmer, except we have frost tonight and tomorrow night. Poor garden.

I asked Vince if we could put dinner off for half an hour while I got the rolls shaped and, of course, he was fine with that.

The last thing was the cake. I made this Lemon Blueberry Cake. It looks so good (and the batter tasted yummy). I hope it turns out good.

This one by far had the most ingredients of anything I made today. You can kinda see to the right where the Mac & Cheese ingredients start but there was a lot for the cake and I combined all the baking powder, soda, etc. in the bowl with the flour and I combined the brown sugar and the white sugar in one bowl or there would have been even more containers.

I ended up using 9" cake pans where the recipe called for 8" pans because I think I threw out my 8" pans because they were dented and looking pretty gross. I need to remember to get more because I prefer 8" layers.

The layers cooled and I took them out and put them in separate gallon size zipper bags and will ice and assemble the cake tomorrow morning and stick it back in the fridge (as directed in the recipe).

I will report back on how the recipes turned out.