little culinary adventures

Lately both Darren and I have had wacky schedules that have made cooking and eating at home a bit of a...challenge. D is in the last semester of a graduate program in molecular microbiology (I know, right?!?) and is working lots and lots of hours in the lab to finish his thesis, and I've been, as I mentioned in my last post, traveling a lot for work.

We try not to eat out much, both because of the expense and because we can cook healthier meals at home, so our slow cooker has really been getting a workout lately. Our favorite recipe at the moment is Crock Pot Chicken Tacos because it's soooo easy, tasty, and good for you! The only problem is that I'm always forgetting to pick up a packet of taco seasoning when I'm at the grocery store, and I was kind of getting tired of needing those packets all the time, anyway!

Enter this recipe for homemade taco seasoning, along with a whole host of basic spices that I'm very happy to have on hand in bulk now, thanks to a trip to Sam's Club over the weekend. I already had several of the spices needed for the recipe, but some were in small quantities, and I knew that this was one recipe I needed to make en masse!

The original recipe stated that it was for 10 servings, but I'm not sure what they were calling a serving since it only really made a small amount of seasoning. I bumped that number up to 100 servings, which sounds insane but was really only 10x the original and made enough for a small bowl full.

It's all mixed up now, and whenever I make a slow cooker full of chicken tacos I just add three tablespoons of this lovely concoction. It's soooo yummy!

Another of our favorite slow cooker recipes is Crock Pot Red Beans and Rice, and over the weekend we chopped up enough veggies, garlic, and sausage to make four batches of it. We dumped those ingredients, along with some creole seasoning, into four gallon-size freezer bags, and now all we have to do to cook one up is pull it out of the freezer and add the contents + water + a bag of dried beans to the slow cooker and turn it on low. Easy, easy, easy! And easy is just what we need these days.