weekend re-cap/twin fest/stew

What a weekend! It was GORGEOUS in Chicago over the weekend, 80’s and Sunny! The highlight of my weekend was getting together with my twin sister Biz and our best friends who are twins. We have been friends since the 3rd grade when they transferred to our school. Up until then we were the only set of twins. Then by 8th grade there were 4 sets of twins, and by high school, I think there were about 12 sets of twins in our graduating class. Although our high school class was almost 1,000 kids!

But what’s been great about our relationship with them is that after all these years, we’ve stayed together. Through college, boyfriends, marriages, divorce, kids, moving, moving and moving again, we’ve always made it a point to get together. Sometimes it may be months in between, but catching up on each others lives is always fun!

I may have had one or two of these to start Twin Fest!

My sister made her famous salsa!

And we ordered pizza!!! YUMMY!

So, since I knew I would be splurging at lunch, I made a big pot of chicken brunswick stew (one of my Dad’s famous recipes!) I put all the ingredients in a huge pot with frozen chicken breasts (boneless and skinless) and by the time I got home it was perfect!

This is what the chicken looks like after taking it out of the pot and shredding it….so perfect!

Here’s his ingredient list:

6 cups canned tomatoes (or I used a 28 oz. can of crushed tomatoes)
2 pounds red potatoes
2 quarts chicken stock
2 cans white corn
5 carrots
2 pounds chicken breasts
1 cup water (or more)
10 oz. frozen baby lima beans (or omit if you don’t like lima beans!)
1 1/2 tablespoons salt
1 tablespoon sugar
1 medium onion, chopped
1/2 cup parsley, chopped (I used about a tablespoon of dried)
1/2 teaspoon pepper

I cut this recipe in half, it made about 10+ cups of thick stew. Then I add a bit of water when I heat up a single bowl.

One tip:

Instead of buying cans of chicken broth, I’ve switched to chicken base. Its in the same section of the store as the canned or boxed broth. For $2.39 cents there is enough base to make tons of cups of soup! You only need 1 tsp. of base per cup of water.

And here is the soup!! It’s even better the next day.

I had to show you a funny picture. At the store this weekend, they had bags of potatoes for only 99 cents for the bag. These were the size of the potatoes!! I weighed this one….it’s 35 ounces!!! And there were about 10 potatoes in the bag almost as big as this one. I have no idea what I am going to do with all those, maybe potato soup is in my future!!

This was my favorite breakfast this weekend. I had two slices of whole wheat artisan bread, 1 slice of swiss cheese, and 1 egg which I “fried” in a pan with Pam Cooking spray. I put it altogether and cooked it like a grilled cheese. So GOOD!