Finally - a food blog post! :)

Monday marked our three-month anniversary! These past three months have gone by so quickly... yikes! We wanted to celebrate by having a nice dinner together, and since the budget is tight in the Reagan house, we decided to forgo a fancy restaurant and be creative!

JC has been telling me for months about this apple pie recipe from his great-grandma... but he hadn’t made it yet, so all I could do was imagine how yummy this pie supposedly was. On Monday he finally made it! And I have decreed that it is not to be called Apple Pie... it’s new name is “Wonderful Pie”. I was very impressed! Not only did it look really good with the cinnamon and sugar dusted on top, it also had a cute message cut into the crust: JC + Bree. Needless to say, the pie was a huge hit and we both ate two pieces that night. :)

One of my family’s favorite special dinners is Chicken Neptune with Stuffed Potatoes. My Mom had made it one night for dinner during one of JC’s visits back when we were dating and he seemed to like it, so I figured that would make a good fancy dinner.

Stuffed Potatoes

I love making stuffed potatoes! They’re soooo easy to make, they taste awesome, and they look like you worked really hard on them, even though you didn't. Here’s the recipe: (I use the term “recipe” loosely... you can pretty much add whatever you want)

• Bake large potatoes at about 400 degrees F for around an hour, until the potatoes are nice and soft inside when you poke them with a fork. Make sure you do NOT wrap the potatoes in tin foil, as that will leave the skin soft, which will make them fall apart later on.
• Cut off the top 1/3 of the potatoes lengthwise.
• Scoop out the inside of the potatoes and put into a mixing bowl.
• Add whatever you want to the potatoes... I usually add any combination of butter, sour cream, cream cheese, cheddar cheese, green onions, bacon bits, etc. This time I added butter, sour cream and parmesan cheese.
• Mash or whip all of the added stuff with the potatoes until it’s nice and smooth with no lumps.
• Scoop the potato mix back into the potato skins and bake in the oven at about 400 again for 20-30 mins.

- Enjoy!

   Chicken Neptune

Chicken Neptune is really easy too! Simply bbq chicken breasts. Top the chicken breasts with asparagus, crab meat, and hollandaise sauce. It sounds weird, but it tastes really yummy. (My mom used to order this every time we went out for dinner to a nice restaurant and it quickly became her favorite!) The store-bought hollandaise sauce mix works fine, but if you have a recipe for homemade, it’s even better! 

You can cook the asparagus however you would like, but my sister found a delicious way to do it and now we cannot go back to simply steaming it. 

• Heat about 4 tbsp of olive oil on medium heat in a frying pan.
• Once the oil is hot (and starting to smoke a little bit), add the asparagus to it. Be careful, the oil will spatter.
• Lightly salt and pepper the asparagus and quickly put a lid over the pan, or else you’ll have oil spattered all over your stove.
• Using tongs, turn the asparagus every minute. It will cook very quickly. Usually it only takes about 5 minutes or so for them to be done.
• The outside will get slightly crispy and a little bit browned from the hot oil, but the flavor is great! I usually hate asparagus, but when it is prepared this way, I don’t mind eating it.

Well, that was our anniversary dinner! Hmm, my first blog post about food.... I should do this more often!

Enjoy the picture! And yes, we were drinking orange juice out of goblets... it looked more fancy. :D