Food, glorious food!

Another one of my New Year's Resolutions is to make at least one new dinner recipe per week. So far, here's what we got:

Peperoncini Beef Sandwiches from A Year of Slow Cooking, a great site for gluten-free Crockpot recipes

We have a two-quart slow cooker and a six-quart slow cooker. I used the six-quart cooker because the meat was too big for the smaller one. The recipe says to cook the meat and peperoncini on low for 8 hours but I did it on high for 4 hours. The meat came out so tender and delicious (and the house smelled so good!). These are sort of like Philly Cheesesteaks, which is something my husband really likes. After the meat is done cooking, put it on a nice crusty bread (or a toasted piece of gluten-free bread), pop a slice of mozzarella or swiss cheese on top, then put it under the broiler. Yummy! I don't even like peppers that much and I liked this. You don't have to eat the peppers on the sandwich. I didn't. But cooking them with the meat gave the meat a nice flavor.

Baked Potato Soup from Shel's Creative Emporium

I tried making a baked potato soup recipe last year and it was terrible. This one is much better and much easier. We were even able to have it on a Monday night... with some prep and tweaking on my part. See, I don't peel potatoes. Maybe some of you do but I don't have time, nor do I have a potato peeler. So I just don't do it. What I will do is cut the potatoes, which I did on Sunday night. The recipe also calls for chopped up cauliflower so I did that on Sunday night, too. I put the potato and cauliflower in Rubbermaid containers and labeled them for my husband so he could easily find them. Then I left out the directions for him and he got the soup started before I came home from work. When I got home, I finished up. You're supposed to puree the soup but our blender has no lid still and I don't have a hand immersion blender. So I used my hand mixer. Worked fine. We cooked the bacon in the microwave. Worked fine. No sour cream on top of our soup. We had it but it's being used for another recipe. Feel free to sour cream and chive it up, if you wish.