More Recipe Help October 31, 2009

From Jane:

Hi Michelle,

Easiest recipe in my box:

-4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts

-Good Seasons Italian dressing mix
-1/2 cup parmesan cheese
-1 teaspoon garlic powder

Mix dry stuff together and coat chicken in it.  Spray glass baking dish with PAM.  Place chicken in dish and bake 20-25 minutes at 350 dg.  Perfect everytime and everyone loves it.  If you need to stretch it to cover another breast add more parm.

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From Linda:

Hi Michelle! I really feel your pain with your dinner situation-hope this idea helps! My kids LOVE it and its easy!

Frozen ravioli-defrosted, frozen spinach-defrosted, jarred spaghetti sauce, parmesan &shredded mozzarella cheese:  Spray a 9 x 13 baking dish; throw the spinach in a skillet with a coating of olive oil and season with salt, pepper and garlic powder…now pour enough sauce in bottom of baking dish to coat and start layering (like lasagna) the ravioli, spinach, cheese and more sauce….on a day where you have more time you can add peppers, mushrooms,pepperoni, meat sauce or whatever else your kids will eat.  The only other thing you need is a loaf of bread! I hope this helps you!!

More of Your Quick Recipes October 31, 2009

I subscribe to a magazine called Simple & Delicious.  Lots of easy recipes with limited ingredient lists.  You would probably enjoy it.  How about simple tomato soup and toasted cheese for a simple supper. – Dolly

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Easy chicken and pasta in about 40 minutes.
Defraust chicken breasts in fridge during work day or day before.  cut into cubes and cook in frying pan with olive oil until cooked all the way. While chicken cooking in separate pan use 1 can cream of mushroom soup, 2 cups water, bring to boil, add 1/2 box pasta rotelle or shells and frozen bag of florentine veggies.  Cook for about 10-12 minutes.  Add chicken and top with parmesan and basil. Serve with butter bread.  A quick family
favorite in our household! – Camille

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From Kathy:  Pork chops with oven roasted potatoes and green beans.

5 med. red skinned potatoes
Salt & Pepper
1 tsp. dried rosemary
1/2 tsp. garlic powder.
Olive oil

cut red skined potatoes into 1/2 in.slices.
Salt & peppper and add dried rosemary flakes and garlic powder to potatoes that you have placed on a cookie sheet. Drizzle the potatoes with olive oil and mix well. Bake potatoes @ 450 degrees for 30 minutes.
Put a small amt. of oil in a frying pan.  Fry the chops that have been seasoned with salt, pepper & rosemary and remove from pan when done. Open canned green beans and drain off half of the liquid.  Heat beans and  half the liquid in the frying pan and scrape up the browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Drizzle pan sauce over chops.  Enjoy!

Easy Recipe LOL October 30, 2009

My easy receipe is called omahasteak.com. Over the years we have had a  lot of illness and little time to cook so I took this route.  The best time to order is when they offer free shipping and discounts.  I placed and order on Tuesday for chicken in pastry, stuffed baked potatoes, pub style cod, coconut shrimp with apricot mango wasabi sauce and sole almondine.  It came to $85. and about $7. per person per meal. Cheaper than McDonalds. Looks like you are paying alot but you don’t need buying additional ingredients.  The chicken in pastry is fantastic.  Simply heat and eat!

-Pat

 

Send in your recipe: must be able to prepare in 30 minutes or less… and have four or fewer ingredients!

Send me your video of you making the dish or explaining the dish and I’ll post your video here!

Chicken Catalina / Meatballs and Noodles October 30, 2009

Hi, Michelle –

Here’s some easy recipes.

Catalina Chicken – Cut up boneless breasts into bite size pieces.  Saute in Catalina Chicken.  I serve it with brown rice or buttered noodles.

Meatballs & noodles.  I heat up frozen meatballs in 2 jars of Savory beef gravy.  Boil package of wide noodles.  Mix together.

Both are very easy and my kids love them.

Hope you like them!
Jennifer

Chicken Tortellini Soup October 30, 2009

Again, send me a short video of you explaining your recipe or even cooking it (no more than eight minutes please) and I’ll post your video here!

Chicken-Tortellini Soup – by Ann

2 or 3 large cans of chicken broth
1 bag frozen tortellini (cheese)
1 bag baby spinach
1 or 2 Giant Eagle roasted chickens skinned and deboned.

Boil tortellini in a separate pan – drain.

Add to the above and you will have a great filling meal.

Chicken and Shells October 30, 2009

Thanks for all of the recipes. I’ll post them here. If any of you are brave enough to send me a video of you making the dish…. I’ll post that, too! Love to see your video here!

My first recipes is called Dinner by Diane:

Buy  a box of the pasta shells (the kind you stuff).

Get a box of chichen stuffing and can of cream of chicken soup.

Cooked chicken- shredded (leftovers work great!)

Mix together chicken and stuffing and stuff them in the shells.  Pour  can of cream of chicken soup over the stuff shells and bake at 350 until they become bubbley and hot .

Hope you like them . Let me know what you think.  Diane

 

 

Recipe Help October 29, 2009

Good morning. I’m sitting here wondering what I’ll fix for dinner tonight. No idea.

I recently got a GIANT cookbook (seriously, it’s 1008 pages!) which has tons of delicious-looking recipes. But each recipe has a million ingredients! Some of which I’ve never heard before. After working all day I need something much more simple to get on the table in 30 minutes or less. Something my kids will eat!

So here’s what I”m asking: Send me some yummy recipes that have no more than four ingredients and take 30 minutes or less to get ready.

Ziggy October 28, 2009

My hairdresser Ziggy at Izzazu looks a little too anxious to chop off my hair!

Message Mix-up October 26, 2009

I embarrassed myself again.  This time it happened while we were at Deep Creek, Maryland (great area!).

When I went down for the beautiful Autumn Glory Festival we stayed at a rental home on the lake called The Treehouse.  It was fantastic!  When we got there we put our stuff inside before heading out to grab some dinner…. but we quickly noticed there wasn’t any toilet paper in the house.  So I called the after-hours number to the rental company on the fridge and left this message:

“Hi. This is Michelle Wright from Pittsburgh. We are in The Treehouse and there is no toilet paper here. It’s not a problem right now since we’re going to get something to eat but it’ll be a problem later on tonight. So please bring us some toilet paper tonight. Thank you.”  And then I left my phone number.

Then it hit me that it was an odd greeting on the answering machine.  At first I thought the after-hours number must go to the on-call manager’s home…. thus, the casual message.   But then I walked back over to the fridge and realized I had dialed the first set of numbers for the after-hours line…and the last four digits of the regular hours line. ARGH!

So some guy named John…. got a message that Michelle Wright was in the treehouse with no toilet paper. Not a problem right now. Could be a problem later on!

P.S. The real after-hours lady told me you’re supposed to provide your own paper products… so after dinner we stopped and bought some.

P.S.S. John never called me back. LOL

Spooky Science Center Plans! October 24, 2009

This just in from the Carnegie Science Center:

THE CREEPY SIDE OF SCIENCE IS CRAWLING TO CARNEGIE SCIENCE CENTER

DISCOVER ALL THINGS ICKY, GHASTLY, AND CREEPY AT SPOOKY SCIENCE ON OCTOBER 31

PITTSBURGH, PA – Carnegie Science Center is busy brewing up creepy concoctions and unleashing caldrons-full of its most thrilling science for Spooky Science on Saturday, October 31. Featuring Halloween-themed hands-on activities and programs, indoor trick-or-treating, and special theater demonstrations, Spooky Science is an unforgettable Halloween experience for kids of all ages.

The Science Center’s mad scientists have scoured their labs for the most shocking, most disgusting, and most hair-raising science demonstrations. From a one-million volt Telsa Coil firing giant arcs of lightning to wrapping their own mummies, visitors will unearth a unique Halloween twist to the Science Center’s ever-popular activities—free with general admission.

Other activities include making glow-in-the-dark slime, creating grossly-realistic wounds, and piecing skeletons together in a giant puzzle. Children are encouraged to come in costume throughout the day for safe, indoor trick-or-treating.

In the Science Center’s Works Theater, visitors can discover the secrets of electricity in special presentations of Frankenscience, an interactive science program that demonstrates the properties of electricity and features the Science Center’s own Frankenstein’s Monster. Experience the only location in Pittsburgh with indoor lightning, thanks to a Tesla Coil that emits one million volts of electricity. In the Kitchen Theater, visitors can sample human brains created from gelatin as they learn the structures of this complex organ.

On Saturday evening, visitors can wrap up their Spooky Science experience with a Family Halloween Laser Show in the Buhl Digital Dome. Beginning at 7 pm, families will be wowed with thrilling colors set to their Halloween music favorites. Laser show tickets are $8 for all visitors, and a $5 add-on price is available for those who come to Spooky Science and stay for the laser show. Members can see the laser show at no cost.

Rock Rhythm & Soul October 19, 2009

I had a wonderful time at the 7th annual Rock Rhythm n’ Soul Night to benefit ALS research (Lou Gehrig’s Disease). Click here to see more about the ALS research that’s happening here in Pittsburgh.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, is a disease of the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord that control voluntary muscle movement. It eventually takes away a person’s ability to do routine tasks such as going up steps or even swallowing.

A special thank you to Dr Bowser for all he does all year for ALS patients. Here’s his bio from his website:

( Dr. Robert Bowser is an Associate Professor of Pathology and Director of the Center for ALS Research. His research focuses upon the cellular and molecular mechanisms of motor neuron degeneration during ALS and he has recently discovered protein biomarker diagnostics for ALS and useful surrogate markers of ALS disease progression using mass spectrometry based proteomics.  his work has been performed in collaboration with Dr. David Lacomis who provided samples and clinical information from ALS patient and control subjects. Dr. Bowser was the first to uncover a panel of protein biomarkers that can distinguish early state ALS patients (near time of symptom onset) from various control groups. He has lectured on this discovery at various international conferences and was honored as a Proteomic Pioneer by ProteoMonitor Newsweekly. He was also honored in 2005 byPittsburgh magazine as one of Pittsburgh’s 40 under 40 for influential young people shaping the region.
Dr. Bowser has been the recipient of numerous research grants from the National ALS Association and also a recipient of the ALS Association’s Lou Gehrig Challenge Award, the most prestigious research grant provided by the ALS Association.)

Sand Art October 15, 2009

This is amazing. Watch how she continues to transform the image.

The Swine Flu & Me October 14, 2009

It started yesterday at work.

Chills. Sore Throat.  Uh oh.

I was hoping to be wrong. But it looks like I have the Swine Flu. Great.  I got the seasonal flu shot a couple of weeks ago. So I guess H1N1 is what hit me. I feel so tired it’s hard to move. UGH.

Getting the Swine Flu is no surprise. I have two children and it’s in their school, I was in a parade over the weekend shaking a lot of hands, and I did a five part series on H1N1 last week. I was doomed. But here’s the surprise. My primary care doctor dumped me!  I’m not kidding. I called him to see if he could phone in a Tamiflu prescription for me and the nurse said I was no longer a patient there.  It seems I haven’t been there since 2001 (when I got a flu shot from them before the shots started being given at WTAE for employees) so I was ditched by my doc.  I explained that I just don’t get sick often. Before anyone yells at me about taking care of myself…. I do get yearly exams at Western Pennsylvani OB/GYN Associates but that doesn’t count for my primary care doc.  So in addition to having the Swine Flu….. I’m now searching for a new doctor!

But enough about that…. here’s something for you to enjoy.  I won’t say which event …. but I helped with a recent charity.   I pulled out my flip video camera while I was up on stage waiting to get started. As I panned across the crowd ……. watch what happens when I get to the jumping castle:

Zoo Photos From Jon Greiner October 13, 2009

You already know Jon Greiner is an awesome reporter.

He’s also an awesome photographer. Check out these photos he took at the zoo!

A Beautiful View at Wisp October 13, 2009

During my weekend in Deep Creek, Maryland, I rode the chair lift at Wisp Resort. It lasted about a 1/2 hour and we had an amazing view of the Fall colors!

See the track below? It’s the Mountain Coaster and SO MUCH FUN!  It’s sort of like a roller coaster but you’re in your own little cart and can control your speed. AWESOME!