I can cook real food too!!

So yes, the title of my blog is Cupcake Sundays, but I'm trying to teach myself how to cook real food too. I'm not completely useless in the kitchen, but I don't have many tricks of my sleeve and I want to see what I can really do. This past Tuesday I had some friends over to play Harry Potter Scene It (I am a big Harry Potter fan) and I decided to cook something from the Harry Potter cookbook my sisters gave me a couple of years ago for Christmas.

Now the biggest issue in this adventure actually was deciding what to make. One of my friends who was coming over is a vegetarian, and everything in my cookbook was either a dessert or a main dish that contained meat. I had promised to make lunch so I needed to figure out something! After reading and rereading, I came across a chicken and mushroom pie. Yes I know that chicken is a meat, but I could make mini ones and have some without chicken! Of course I had to make some also without mushrooms because another friend doesn't like mushrooms. Usually when you make a chicken pie, you use chicken broth, I simply substituted it for a vegetable broth and made 12 mini pies in a cupcake pan! Take a look:

They came out really good, and a big thanks to Pam and Meredith who somehow ended up taking over towards the end, it was a group effort and we did a great job. And look, we even made the pies in a cupcake pan!

When prepping the chicken and mushroom pies I took out way to much chicken to defrost, so I had to do something with it. I made a few pieces into a yummy chicken salad with pesto mmmm LOVE pesto! I don't have a picture of this, but I can tell you I was impatiently waiting for my dinner break on Thursday at work to eat it! On Wednesday I made my Dad and I a delicious calzone. I sauteed mushrooms, peppers and onions on the stove and added that to the leftover chicken. I rolled out the pizza dough and alternated layers of sauce, mozzarella cheese, chicken and veggies and then folded it over and YUM!

This was the first time I've made a calzone, so at first I was worried that I had put to much inside. I was imagining opening the oven and there being a giant mess, but it worked out great! I'm excited to cook something again soon, its tough with my work schedule and I hate cooking for just me, but I'll make a yummy meal again very soon :)

Happy Cooking!