College Cooking with Celia

Weekly Gratitude #17

Sophomore year is finally officially done! And I am home for 2 weeks before I head back to Pittsburgh to work and take some classes over the summer. I am SO excited to be home and to see my brothers and my dad for the first time since Christmas. And to relax and get some good reading in 🙂

This week was finals week which is of course incredibly stressful, but there are of course things to be grateful for! Lemme know below what you’re thankful for this week! I’d love to chat 🙂

This week I’m thankful for:

Waking up in time for Easter service
Making oatmeal chocolate chip cookies
Studying ochem with Rachel
Lying on the floor
Doing well on my practice exam
Catching up on my tv shows
Feeling pretty confident about my ochem final!!
Free dinner at Piada because of rewards
Chilling on Rachel’s porch to celebrate surviving ochem!!
Ice cream runs
Silly life chats until 2 am
Parallel parking successfully (47 turns later)
Good gym days
Queer Eye and dinner with Shelby
Homewrecker birthday dinners
Free dinner for playing at commencement
Killing my stat exam
Fried rice
A whole day of relaxing
Watching movies with my people
Quesadillas
Packing (I like the organization of it haha)
Driving home

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

I took my very last final this morning so I am here with a celebratory (or let’s be honest, any day) cookie recipe. Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies are absolutely my favorite kind of cookie. They’re soft from the oatmeal, the cinnamon makes them warm and comforting, and you can never go wrong with melty chocolate chips.

I grew up making the recipe from the lid of the Quaker Oats jar and let me tell you, there’s no messing with the classic. These are absolutely my favorite cookie and I could eat them any day of the week. But, I am just one girl, and one batch makes a ton of cookies (5 dozen I think? Although it ends up being less after all the dough that inevitably gets eaten…). So I cooked up half the dough and put the other half in the freezer– perfect for a rainy day in the future when all you want is a warm cookie.

Oh! And a trick to keeping any cookies soft for weeks? Just stick the heel of your loaf of bread in the tupperware with your freshly baked cookies. Works like a charm 🙂 (Shoutout to my friend Jare’s mom for that)

So without further ado, my FAVE Quaker Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies!

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients

3/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 stick plus 6 tablespoons of softened butter
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
3 cups Quaker oats (quick cook or old fashioned)
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

Instructions

Heat oven to 350°F
In a large bowl, beat butter and sugars together on medium speed until creamy.
Add eggs and vanilla
In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking soda and cinnamon. Add to wet ingredients and mix well.
Add oats and chocolate chips; mix well.
Drop dough by rounded spoonfuls onto greased cookie sheet and cook 8-10 minutes. Let cool 1 minute and remove from sheet. Let cool completely, store in tightly sealed container.

Sheet Pan Honey Mustard Chicken

There are so many sauces out there for chicken, and I feel like it can be a polarizing debate of which one is the best. But my roommate and I LOVE honey mustard. I think I stumbled across this recipe on Facebook and it seemed perfect: one sheet pan, forty minutes, and honey mustard chicken!

I adjusted the recipe a little bit just based on what we had which made it a bit easier. And it’s already pretty easy!! Microwave the potatoes so they start out a little softer, throw everything on a sheet pan, and bake until the chicken is done.

So try out this Honey Mustard Chicken recipe for your next weeknight dinner!

Sheet Pan Honey Mustard Chicken

From Carlsbad Cravings

Cook time: 45 minutes

Serves: 2-3

Ingredients

Chicken:

1 large or 2 medium boneless skinless chicken breasts
1 teaspoon each of: garlic powder, paprika, dried parsley, and salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper

Honey Mustard Sauce

1/3 cup honey
6 tablespoons mustard (yellow or Dijon)

Vegetables

2 tablespoons olive oil
Salt and pepper
2 Russett potatoes, cubed
1/2-1 pound of green beans

Instructions

Mix together honey and mustard. Set aside 1/4 cup to coat chicken when it bakes.
Add potatoes to a microwave safe bowl, cover with water, and microwave for about 8 minutes. Drain water and add the potatoes to the sheet pan. Toss the potatoes in one tablespoon of olive oil and season with salt and pepper.
Split the potatoes in half to make room for the green beans. Toss the green beans in another tablespoon of olive oil, season with salt and pepper, and place in the middle of the potatoes.
Add one tablespoon of olive oil and the “chicken seasonings” to a bowl. Add the chicken and massage the spices into the chicken.
Using the 1/4 cup of reserved honey mustard, coat the chicken and then place the chicken on top of the green beans. Spoon any leftover sauce and spices over the chicken.
Bake at 400°F for 35 minutes or until chicken reaches 165°F. Let chicken rest 10 minutes and then serve with remaining honey mustard.

Weekly Gratitude #16

Happy Easter! I hope everyone is having a lovely and relazing day. I know I’ve been a little MIA this week, but this past week was the week before finals and it was BUSY. I had a lab final Monday, 3 essays due Wednesday, a presentation on Friday, plus my ochem final is tomorrow. But I’m back this week with some good stuff so stay tuned 🙂 (including a sheet pan honey mustard chicken recipe that my roommate and I are obsessed with, and my fave cookies of all time).

Even though this week was busy and stressful, there was plenty to be thankful for. What are you all thankful for this week? Lemme know below, I’d love to chat!

This week I’m thankful for:

Finally being done with ochem lab
Pasta
Old family pictures (that I used for my Italian presentation)
Warm weather
Getting the spring break chair position for Habitat!
Sitting outside and chatting
Making homemade chili
Peanut M&Ms
Frozen Reese’s
Gilmore girls
Life chats about the future
Friends who always pick up the phone
A really good week of workouts
Training the new lab aide at work
Studying with Rachel
Thunderstorms
A really great Easter service
Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies

Weekly Gratitude #15

It is VERY rainy today which, though it makes me want to get all cozy, is not very conducive to productivity. I also have a band concert tonight which should be fun. Plus my mama is here!!! I haven’t seen her since December so this weekend has been full of all the hugs and catching up and eating yummy food. And this past week was pretty good too. We’re hitting the home stretch of the semester, last week of classes before finals week! Cue lots of studying and finishing up essays and projects.

What have you all been up to this week? And what are you grateful for? Lemme know below 🙂

This week, I’m grateful for:

Last ochem lab!
Making slime in ochem lab
Watching Carol for my photography and art class
Late night banana bread
Leftover stir fry
My wonderful supportive peeps
Catching up on Grey’s Anatomy
Sleeping in
Honey mustard chicken (peep the blog this week for the recipe!)
Banana bread toasted with peanut butter
Phone calls from my mama
Productivity
Boy Meets World (my absolute favorite show)
Shorts weather
A super good leg day at the gym
Successful concert band rehearsals
Fried rice
Finally making it to the gym on Friday morning
Life chats with my roommate
Productive Friday nights
Listening to research presentations for work
Sunshine
Seeing my mom for the first time since December!!!!
Grocery shopping
Dinner and gelato and walking around Lawrenceville
A super good church service
Brunch
Cozy rainy days

Banana Bread

On Monday I was REALLY craving banana bread (especially because I had some rather brown bananas). So even though I got home at 11 pm, I texted my mom and asked for her recipe and proceeded to bake banana bread until midnight. College, right?

And let me just tell you, my mom has the BEST banana bread recipe. She actually has 2, a coconut lime one and a plain one. I went for plain since I have neither limes nor coconut. But it is so good. It’s soft and moist and cinnamony and it tastes like home. And since I used brown sugar instead of white, it developed this amazing caramelized flavor.

This banana bread is great right out of the oven, warmed in a toaster oven with some butter, or (my favorite) toasted up with some peanut butter for the perfect breakfast or snack.

So let those bananas get nice and brown and whip up a batch of my mom’s banana bread! So easy and so delicious 🙂

Banana Bread

Cook time: 1 hour

Makes: 1 loaf

Ingredients

4 mashed bananas
1 egg
1 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup applesauce (or shortening or vegetable oil)
1 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
1 tablespoon cinnamon

instructions

Cream together applesauce (or shortening/oil), egg, sugar, and vanilla.
Add bananas.
Mix remaining dry ingredients and add to creamed mixture
Bake in greased loaf pan at 350°F for 1 hour or until done

Ground Beef Stir Fry

For some reason, lately I’ve really been craving stir fry and fried rice. So this weekend, after doing a little bit of research into how I could make a sauce for it, I threw together what I had in the fridge and made this delicious ground beef stir fry.

It really couldn’t be easier. I sauteed some ground beef with garlic and ginger, added some frozen broccoli and some diced bell pepper, poured my sauce in, and served it with rice. And I made sure to make extra rice so I can make fried rice on Thursday 😉

A couple quick notes– I used 80/20 ground beef so I didn’t need to add oil to the pan. But if you use something leaner you’ll want to add a little bit of vegetable oil to the pan so it isn’t too dry. I also used grated fresh ginger (which you can keep in the freezer to make it last longer!), but if you don’t have any, you can just use about a teaspoon of ground ginger. Same goes for the garlic!

So I ate this with rice, but you could totally do it with noodles if you have them! Just toss them in the pan once they’re cooked so they can get nice and coated in the sauce.

Also feel free to use any vegetables you may have! This would be super good with a frozen veggie mix, or just any frozen or fresh veggies like green beans, peppers, broccoli, corn, or squash.

Ground Beef Stir Fry

Serves: 2

Cook time: 20 minutes

Ingredients

1/2 pound ground beef
1 tablespoon grated fresh ginger (or 1 teaspoon ground ginger)
2 cloves of garlic, minced
About 1 cup frozen broccoli
1/2 red bell pepper, diced
1/4 cup soy sauce
3 tablespoons brown sugar
2 tablespoons Sriracha (or less)
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1 cup cooked white rice for serving

Instructions

In a sauce pan over medium heat, cook the ground beef with the ginger and garlic until brown and cooked through.
While the beef is cooking, prepare the sauce by whisking together the soy sauce, brown sugar, Sriracha, and cornstarch.
Once the meat is cooked through, add the vegetables and cook until tender but not too soft. 3-5 minutes.
Add the prepared sauce and cook until it begins to thicken,
Serve over rice!

Weekly Gratitude #14

What a week this has been. It was super long but somehow went by really quickly? And now I’m sick (which is excellent timing considering finals are in two weeks). I’m just congested and sneezing and exhausted which is rough. Although that did mean I went to bed at 11:30…

But! There are always things to be thankful for, and in all honesty this was a pretty good week. So here’s my Weekly Gratitude, let me know below what you’re thankful for this week!

This week I’m grateful for:

Sunday night study dates with Rachel
Doing pretty well on my ochem test
Making Luminol in ochem lab!!
Watching Rear Window for my Photo and Art class
Warm weather finally!
Sunshine!
Peanut butter toast
Silliness at work
Pasta
Handing out candy to advocate for Habitat
Finishing my book (The ABC Murders)
Christian fellowship group that spoke to exactly what I needed to hear
My girl Morgan asking me to join her d-group
Friends who pick up the phone no matter what and talk to you about stupid things to keep your mind off stress
Neighbors who leave you dark chocolate ❤
“Study” dates and popcorn with Carissa and Deena
Finding new podcasts (specifically Sawbones, it’s super interesting!!)
Habitat adventures
Black beans
Pizza
Post Habitat naps
Making dinner with Shelby
Going to bed at 11:30
Chamomile tea
Productive days in Carnegie Library

Sesame Chicken

A recipe that isn’t pasta? Who would’ve thought??

This is another Budget Bytes recipe that I’ve been making a TON. My roommate loves sesame chicken. A lot. So in an effort to help her eat at home more, especially when she’s craving Chinese take out, I looked up a sesame chicken recipe. I liked this one the most because it didn’t involve deep frying the chicken, so it was a little healthier. And it couldn’t be easier!

We eat this with white rice and my sautéed green beans and it’s amazing. I will be honest though, I couldn’t find sesame oil for a price that didn’t make me cringe, so I’ve just been using vegetable oil instead and upping the amount of sesame seeds. Although one of my friends just found a cheap Asian grocery store, so maybe that’ll change… regardless it still tastes great so don’t be stressed out if you can’t find sesame oil.

So another shoutout to Beth from Budget Bytes, coming in clutch with easy, delicious, and cheap recipes! Find the original recipe here

Sesame Chicken

Ingredients

Serves: 4

Cook time: 25 minutes

Chicken:

1 large egg
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1 pinch each of salt and pepper
1 pound boneless skinless chicken breast
2 tablespoons cooking oil

Sauce:

1/4 cup soy sauce
2 tablespoons water
1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil (I’ve just been using vegetable oil)
3 tablespoons brown sugar
1 tablespoon rice vinegar
1 teaspoon grated fresh ginger (or dried, powdered ginger!)
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tablespoon sesame seeds (double if you aren’t using sesame oil)
1/2 tablespoon cornstarch

For serving:

Cooked white rice

Instructions

First, prepare the sauce. In a small bowl stir together soy sauce, water, oil, sugar, vinegar, ginger, garlic, sesame seeds, and cornstarch. Let sit while you prepare everything else.
In a large bowl, whisk together the egg, cornstarch, salt, and pepper. Trim the fat off the chicken and cut into 1 inch pieces. Toss the chicken in the egg and cornstarch mixture.
Add the cooking oil to a large skillet and heat over medium heat. Once the skillet is very hot, add the batter coated chicken and spread it out into a single layer.
Allow the chicken to cook without touching it!! Until it’s golden brown on the bottom. Then carefully flip the pieces, breaking up the large clumps as you flip (and be careful not to knock off the coating). Continue to cook the chicken on the other side until golden brown, stirring as little as possible.
Once the chicken is cooked through and golden brown on all sides, add the sauce. Toss the chicken in the sauce and bring to a simmer so the sauce can begin to thicken.
Serve chicken over rice!

Chicken Parm Pasta

I made this recipe for dinner last weekend and it was a total improvisation. I wanted something that wouldn’t take long to make on Sunday night, and we were a bit lacking in the produce department, so this is what happened. And guys it was so good. And made enough for leftovers for dinner a couple days later!

I know the one picture I got isn’t super great, but I promise this is worth it. A perfect and easy weeknight meal with just a few pantry/freezer staples 🙂

Chicken Parm Pasta

Cook time: 20 minutes

Serves: 2-3

Ingredients

4 ounces of pasta (I used angel hair, but any shape works)
1 chicken breast
Olive oil
2 cloves of garlic, minced
Salt
Pepper
1 teaspoon basil
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes
About 1 cup of canned crushed tomatoes (I keep leftovers crushed tomatoes in a tupperware in the fridge/freezer)
Balsamic vinegar
Parmesan cheese

Instructions

Boil water and cook pasta until tender, according to package directions
Cut the chicken breast into cubes, about one inch.
In a saucepan over medium heat and in about 1 tablespoon of olive oil, cook the chicken until cooked through, about 7-10 minutes. Season with salt and pepper.
Add the minced garlic and cook about 2 minutes. Then add the crushed tomatoes, the basil, red pepper flakes, and salt and pepper to taste.
Add a splash of balsamic vinegar and cook about 5-7 minutes.
Finish with parmesan cheese and serve over the pasta