It's Chicken & Dumpling Day!

When we made up our last meal plan, I didn't account for as many left over days as we wound up having. That left us with extra groceries as the 2 weeks comes up today- yay! That'll mean good things for my grocery bill. Last time, I bought a 4 pound bag of individually frozen boneless, skinless Chicken breasts. It came out fairly cheap, too- around $1.50 per pound!

Until this morning, we hadn't used any of it. We thawed 5 pieces (which still leaves just about 6-7 big pieces!), and stuck them in the crock this morning, along with half a bag of frozen corn, half a bag of frozen peas, 1 can of cream of mushroom & chicken soup, 1 can of cream of chicken soup, and 4 sliced redskin potatoes. Being that it's a meal we did not plan for in our last meal plan, I do need to grab 2 things from the store to complete it- baby carrots, and a can of refrigerator biscuits to make the dumplings from.

We have never actually made Chicken & Dumplings before, so while we made the stew itself just from a basic stew recipe (2-3 veggies, potatoes, meat, soup, and a gravy mix), I looked around online to find an easy way to make the dumplings.

Most required prep work- making them from scratch. I'm not opposed to it, but I figured there must be an easier way- and there is!

I found a recipe at Cooks.com by Megan Durbin that calls for refrigerator biscuits cut into quarters, and rolled into balls. How easy is that?!

Meanwhile, I'm working on my meal plan for the next two weeks. I have a lot of left over food from two weeks ago, so I'm going to have an easy grocery bill this time around! It was our first two weeks of being on a meal plan. We didn't cheat for dinner at all over the past two weeks, and Nick was able to take left overs for lunch nearly every day! The few times he couldn't, he had enough snacks on hand in his cube to eat from. He also had a few FREE Deli Creation sandwiches in his mini fridge. I picked up two more yesterday for him to take in today. He leaves them alone so he has them for the days when he forgets his lunch, or we didn't have anything left over for him.

It's funny to hear him talk about how his co-workers come sniffing around when he warms up his left overs. They're always curious as to what he has each time! I told him one of these days, we should make a big batch of something over night in the crock pot, and send it to work with him to share.

Well, it's time to head to the store! If I didn't want those baby carrots in the stew, I'd wait until later, when I've completed a meal plan, but I have to get the carrots in soon, or they won't work.