Super Yum!!

My son is soon to be 5 years old and is pretty much perfect.  Ok, so that may be a stretch, but darn it, he's awesome!  One thing he has always excelled at is eating, which I think only I know because he is tall and bony leaving everyone else to think that I leave him to starve.  But this boy can eat.  I don't know where he puts it, but he can put it away.  And he's not a very picky eater either.  Sometimes I have to word things to sound more appetizing, but his pallet is pretty accepting.  However, and this is a big however, he has to be the slowest eater on the planet.  He enjoys food, there are just billions of other things he'd rather be doing than sitting still and chewing.  So generally mealtime consists of a whole lot of bite counting and bribery.

For lunch today I made another one of the recipes I mentioned before, Chicken Puffs from the All Recipes website.  FANTASTIC!  It's like a hand-held chicken pot pie.  Chicken, garlic, onions, cream cheese, croissants, count me in!  Or as my cousin Robin once said, "You had me at cream cheese."  :D  I think it's technically an appetizer but stick a side of veggies on a plate with 3 or 4 of these and you have a meal, or just throw some in a bowl, which is what we did.  Tada!

Ok, so they didn't all look so pretty.   The recipe simply says "roll into a ball."  Thanks, how helpful.  Except rolling a goop-filled triangle of croissant dough into a ball is not all that simple.  Most of them looked more like this:

I gave my son the prettier ones so he could eat them with his hands and I ate the leaky ones with a fork.  He poked the top with his finger and asked if it was bread.  When I told him it was bread with chicken in it he dove right in.  He downed 3 of them in record time.  And I didn't have to say anything; I was still finishing my tea!!  This is a big deal folks!  Needless to say this is going to be on the menu again very soon.

You can find the recipe here, the only tweaks I made were that I used canned chicken because we seem to have amassed back-stock of the stuff and I used 2 cans of croissants instead of 1, I just used them whole instead of cutting them.  You can use cubed chicken breasts if you like, but I would think it would be lumpy.  Since this is still a financially-driven exercise, lets see what this cost; $2 for a big can of chicken, $3 for 2 packages of crescent roll dough, $1.50 for cream cheese, $0.75 onion (I chop and freeze them so I can use small amounts at a time).  So for $7.25 I fed the 3 of us.  Add a can of green beans or other veggie for under a buck and we're still way under our typical $18 fast food meal for 3.  And think of all the small tweaks you could make to change this entirely.  Instead of garlic and onions, how about Rotel and cheese?  Or red peppers and jalapenos?  Or swiss cheese and ranch dip?  MMMmmmm.....   What tweaks do you want to try?