cooking mama

Have you ever played the game Cooking Mama?  It's this ridiculous video game where the main character cooks up dishes and you get scores as you help to 'prep' all the ingredients and follow the recipes until you complete the dish.  It's awesomely kawaii and fobby and I turned my sister onto it not so long ago (or so it feels) and we cracked up endlessly.  Especially when we'd mess up the recipes and Cooking Mama would get upset with us and have flames in her eyes :)  Don't worry, Mama will fix it!

I've felt a bit like Cooking Mama lately, which isn't such a bad thing.  And no, no flame eyes for me - Cooking Mama would be proud of my dishes I think!  I forgot how much I've missed cooking! Here's what I've been making (some are from this weekend and some are from the past couple of weeks):

New York Times' easiest macaroni and cheese.  I read about this recipe on Smitten Kitchen and had to try it for myself!  It really was easy especially since you don't have to pre-boil the macaroni and I ate the leftovers for days.

Pepperoni pizza.  Well, obviously, this was for Matt.  I used the pizza dough from Trader Joe's as a base, then used their pizza sauce, mozzarella cheese, and gourmet pepperoni.  Did you know Trader Joe's sells pepperoni?  I like that they also seriously call it 'gourmet pepperoni.'  I think Matt liked the pizza a lot, he ate 5 pieces, haha.

Mini corn dogs!  I saw this recipe from The Cooking Bride and as lovers of corn dogs, I had to try it out.  It was really easy, fried up in a cinch, and they were SO good.  Crunchy and slightly sweet - totally delish.  We were happy campers that night :)

And this lovely banana bread.  As you may know, I *love* Mel's Kitchen Cafe blog since every recipe I've tried (and I've tried a LOT) is easy and turns out wonderfully delicious!  I've made this banana bread a few times and I was in a baking mood so it was a no brainer.  My bananas seemed a little small, so I ended up using 4 bananas instead of 3 as called for in the recipe.  It was as delicious as it looks.  

I also made butter chicken (or chicken tikka masala) again using this recipe for inspiration but I changed up a lot of the ingredients and the method.  Of course, I forgot to take any pictures of it in my hurry to eat the deliciousness, but trust me that it was good!  I used my food processor to really blend up the onions, garlic, ginger, and jalapenos so my sauce wouldn't be chunky.  And I usually use tomato sauce rather than diced tomatoes to make it smooth and saucy.  Perfect to use naan to sop it all up!  Also, I don't broil the chicken with yogurt beforehand, just plopped chicken chunks into the sauce and simmered away.  And to keep the sauce from being watery, I just topped with cilantro on my plate rather than mixed it all in.  

Tasty treats!  Looking forward to making some other goodies soon :)