Cooking weekend

I've had a rare full weekend off (on a holiday weekend, no less!) and have been spending a lot of time cooking ahead. Not too much, though, because I've overdone it before and worn myself out. I wanted just enough to have plenty of meals for lunches and dinners ready and still get to enjoy my time ("Horrible Bosses" was very funny, and "Win Win" was great. Recommend them both).

So what have I been cooking? I tried some of the mason jar meals I posted about earlier: the sliders, corn dogs and creamy chicken curry with cilantro lime rice. I also made more chili and cornbread muffins (because CORNBREAD is what you serve with chili, dammit), and chicken enchilada soup. And I had already made some sloppy joe mix about a week ago.

Chili & cornbread muffins.

Chicken enchilada soup.

Here's notes on the others:

Corn dogs

I halved the recipe listed because I wanted to see how they turned out, plus by the time I got to this recipe on Sunday, I was down to just 6 mason jars. I ended up with batter to make only five, though (so that means Buster got half a frankfurter — he was happy!) They didn't quite look done at 20 minutes, so I put them in for another three and probably could have done another couple of minutes, really. I also forgot to grease the jar before pouring in the batter, but I just ran a knife sprayed with Pam around the edge as soon as I took them out of the oven, and they didn't stick too bad.

Sliders

These were pretty good right out of the oven. We'll see how they do after being frozen and reheated. I did forget to pat down the meat to get rid of the excess grease, but they turned out pretty good. I also had trouble getting them in jars, even the 16-ounce ones I have. Maybe it's because I used King's Hawaiian rolls for the buns? I bagged them in pairs in sandwich bags instead. Kinda defeats part of the purpose of using the jars, I know, but it's all I had.

Creamy chicken curry with cilantro lime rice

This was pretty good, but I'll have to do some tweaking. I made the rice a bit differently. First of all, I used brown rice, since that's what I had. And I made it more like the rice dishes at Something Edible, adding the cilantro & lime zest to the butter, browning the rice, then adding the water with the lime juice and salt in the water. It does give the rice a lot more flavor, but in this dish, it might have added too much lime flavor. Or maybe I needed more curry to balance out the lime? Haven't had a lot of curry dishes, so I'm not sure how spicy it should be.

So the final tally of my cooking weekend:
Sliders — 5 pairs
Chicken enchilada soup — 10 8 oz jars
Chili — 8 8 oz jars
Corn dogs — 4
Chicken curry & rice — 5
Sloppy joes — 7

So that's a total of 39 meals. Maybe along with the occasional turkey sandwich, and if I make some lasagna again later, I'll have enough variety to keep me from getting too bored and caving to a desire for going out to lunch or raiding the vending machine too often. It'll be interesting to see how my bank account shapes up later.