Pin Testing - Pioneer Woman's Roasted Carrots (plus Poppy Seed Chicken recipe)

I love finding new recipes and projects on Pinterest, but I always find myself wishing someone would actually try the activity and say whether or not it's really as easy as it looks. So, I've decided to be a "Pin" tester (my fellow IT Security nerds will get that joke) and find out for myself! Today I tried a recipe from The Pioneer Woman for oven-roasted carrots. I LOVE the Pioneer Woman - not only does she live in Oklahoma, her recipes are always simple and delicious (plus, she's hilarious and gives away lots of free goodies). You can find the original recipe on her blog here.

The recipe calls for 12 carrots,  1/4 cup of olive oil, salt, pepper, and thyme. Ree (Pioneer Woman) has a great garden so she usually uses fresh herbs in her recipes, but since we don't have a garden yet I just used dried thyme leaves.

Here's what you'll need

Rinse the carrots (and peel if you'd like), then slice in half length-wise. Place sliced carrots on a cookie sheet and toss in olive oil until they're evenly coated. Season with salt, pepper, and thyme and toss in a 400 degree oven for 35 to 40 minutes. That's it! Easy peasy. However, having the world's smallest kitchen complicates matters when you have something else taking up your oven, so in this case I cooked the carrots in our toaster oven. I set it to 400 degrees as the recipe called for, but this oven tends to cook things more quickly than a conventional oven so mine were done after only 20 minutes. I also think it depends on the size of the carrots you're working with - mine looked smaller than those in the original recipe, so just keep an eye on them and pull them out when the edges of the smaller ends begin to turn brown.

Here are my carrots getting ready to go in the oven:

And here they are after 20 minutes at 400 degrees in the toaster oven:

Let me tell you, these carrots were AMAZING! They tasted almost exactly like sweet potato fries - sweet and salty and delicious. And Joe loved them, which was great since he's not a huge veggie fan. We will definitely be having these again. We had these along with Poppy Seed Chicken casserole, one of my favorite recipes introduced to me by my friend Katie during college. And since I had the camera out anyway, I thought I'd make this a two-fer! Here's what you need to make poppy seed chicken:

Poppy seed chicken ingredients

4 boneless skinless chicken breasts (you can substitute canned chicken as well)

1 can of cream of chicken soup

1 16 oz tub of sour cream

1 sleeve of Ritz crackers

1/2 cup of butter

Poppy seeds

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Begin by boiling the chicken breasts until thoroughly cooked, then shred. WARNING - the chicken is ridiculously hot at this point and I've burned my fingers being overly eager to shred the chicken right away, but it's really not worth it. My suggestion is to find something to do for 5 minutes while it's cooling off and then shred. Place shredded chicken in a bowl.

Mix in the cream of chicken soup and sour cream, then stir until mixed. Scoop the chicken mixture into a casserole dish.

Take your sleeve of Ritz crackers (I usually use one and a half sleeves for wide pans like this) and pour crackers into a Ziploc bag. Beat on the bag with the nearest blunt object just prior to the point of your neighbors complaining, and then pour the crushed crackers on top of the chicken mixture. This is a good way to spend those 5 minutes waiting for the chicken to cool!

Melt the butter in the microwave and pour on top of the crackers (or use a basting brush if you have one) and then sprinkle the casserole with poppy seeds. At this point it should look something like this:

Pop that sucker in the oven for 30 minutes and let it get nice and toasty. The crackers should be slightly brown when you take it out and it will smell like buttery deliciousness.

Yummy!

Serve with your choice of side and proceed to stuff your face! We had our casserole with the roasted carrots and some steamed broccoli - it was yummy! 

You'll probably need a nap after all that food... these boys did and they didn't even have any of the casserole!

The House!

Joe and I spent several months looking for an existing home in Pittsburgh, but the style of homes up here is so different from those in Oklahoma that we finally decided to go ahead and build a home. We went with Ryan Homes which was suggested to us by a co-worker who is also building a house with them. We were elated to find a neighborhood that had flat back yards with plenty of space for the dogs to run (most of the yards here have sheer drop offs or steep inclines almost directly off the back door) and because the neighborhood was previously owned and partially developed by a custom home builder, Ryan was offering incentives to buyers that included non-typical upgrades to match the neighborhood covenants. We settled on Beaver, PA which is a suburb of Pittsburgh and is about 30 minutes outside of our office. It has a great school system and a super cute downtown area with shops and restaurants.

The model home in our neighborhood is the "Palermo", and after exploring the other options for the neighborhood we decided to stick with that plan. It's a great open floor plan with plenty of room for us and the dogs. After it's all said and done, we should have around 3,300 square feet (including the basement, which is a totally new concept for me).

We opted for the four foot extension to the master bedroom and office, master bathroom option A (roman shower, no soaking tub), no bonus room, two car garage with front entry, kitchen with gourmet island and morning room, and finished basement with powder room.

2nd Floor

1st Floor

Basement

We signed our contract to build the new house in late February and slapped the "sold" sticker on our lot of choice :-) Hooray!

This is Joe's Fonzie impression

I don't know what I was going for here :-/

We made our choices with Guardian for the alarm system and electrical wiring, and we recently went to Ryan's design center to pick out our flooring and cabinets. I have jumped on the grey wall paint bandwagon, so we decided to go with dark wood floors, white trim, and grey walls (we'll paint the walls after the house is finished). After going back and forth over the cabinet and counter top colors, we finally settled on a modern-looking dark "espresso" cabinet with greyish granite counter tops to match the walls. We also picked out a neutral cream colored carpet and ceramic tile.

Now we're just waiting for the loan paper work to be done processing and our home will be under construction! They have us slated to begin construction some time in May and be move-in ready around the end of July, but we're hoping they'll bump us up so we can get in sooner.

And that's the latest update on the house! Now I'm just praying for Spring to be here, I'm beyond done with the cold winter weather!

Welcome

Welcome to What’s New in the 412! This is my first blog, so please bear with me as I get used to the ins and outs of blog posting :-) I’ve had several friends suggest the idea of creating a blog to keep everyone in Oklahoma (or elsewhere) updated on what’s happening with Joe and me in Pennsylvania, so I figured I’d give it a try! We have lots of big things happening – Joe got a new job (still working in IT at Williams, but doing more fast-paced activities) and I was fortunate enough to be able to continue doing my same job with Williams, just working remotely. This is the first time either of us have lived this far away from our families and close friends, but we’re excited about the prospect of starting a new journey somewhere different.

We’re currently living in a 650 sq ft apartment with our two big dogs (yikes!) but we’re building a house with Ryan Homes in Beaver, PA which is about 30 minutes outside of Pittsburgh. The house should be ready sometime in July, which can’t come soon enough for us! I’ll post the details that we have so far and continue giving updates as we get them. 

Check back here for updates on the house, our adventures in Pittsburgh, craft projects, and more!