October 24th: chicken divan, peekaboo muffins, cheesecake bars

Verdict:
Try Again: chicken, muffins, cheesecake

Sunday usually finds me cooking and baking up a storm, and Olivia likes to help out. Liam brought this Cooking With My Kid blog to my attention, and I saw a recipe I wanted to try out: Peekaboo Jam Muffins. Mini muffins with jam in the middle; what more could a kid want? Olivia's jobs, when baking, include dumping/pouring ingredients into bowls, sometimes stirring (can be disastrous!) and, her favourite, putting paper liners in the muffin pan.

I stuffed the muffins with three different types of jam/jelly, and the best kind was some raspberry jelly that Grandma gave me when we visited this past summer.

The jelly had the strongest flavour, which stood out the best in the completed muffins.

For supper tonight, I went real fancy and cooked up a Campbell's Soup recipe: Easy Chicken and Broccoli Divan. Shannon may recall cooking this for us last year when she lived with us temporarily (come back!). We had this with some tri-colour fusilli and salad. This is a pretty good recipe, but I would make one change: no need to cook the broccoli in advance; it just ends up mushy. I'm wondering if you could get away with not cooking the chicken in advance either. It's not clear to me why it needs to be done.

Finally, my treat for the week: from October 2010's Chatelaine: Pumpkin & chocolate cheesecake bars. I ate one of these tonight while they were still warmish, and I liked it. We'll see how they are tomorrow after firming up in the refrigerator. The candied ginger (love it!) in the crust is the most powerful flavour in these; if you're not a ginger fan, leave it out!