Easter Feast

I hope you all had a wonderful Easter! After attending church with family and friends, we then went out to breakfast to fill our bellies, play football with sugar packets and build towers with creamers! Before the parties and gatherings that we attended yesterday afternoon, my time was spent in the kitchen. I was in charge of the appetizers for our Easter Feast so I decided to share what I made!

The first concoction is my favorite go-to hors d'oeuvre. Everybody loves them and they're pretty easy to make. Here are the ingredients for my Cheesy Ranch Chicken Cups:

Two packs of already cooked chicken (you can cook your own chicken, but if I'm able to buy hormone-free, gluten-free already prepared chicken for just a couple bucks, you better believe I'm going to!)

Cheese (Mexican or Colby Jack)

Sour Cream

Ranch

Hot Sauce (we looove Cholula!)

One Small onion

One Red Pepper

Won Ton Wrappers (Egg Roll wraps)

First thing first. You're going to need to chop the onion, red pepper and chicken into super small pieces. One of the best tools for this job is the slap chop; it'll probably save you an hour worth of work. This is how small it needs to be:

Best tool for the job!

Next, throw in about a half cup of sour cream, a quarter cup of ranch and pour in some hot sauce. I went a little mild this time (about a teaspoon). The consistency needs to be sticky, not wet. If it's able to clump together, then you're good to go!

Mix it all up and throw in my favorite ingredient: cheese! I threw in a little over a cup (8oz)

Mix that all up and set it aside. Next, we're going to bust out the won ton wrappers. Make sure you peel them all the way apart. They put flour on them so that they separate, but they still seem to stick together. They're pretty thin:

Place them in the cups of your mini muffin pan, like so:

Then, fill your cups with about a heaping tablespoon worth of filling! 

After that's all prepared, stick the pan in a 350* oven for 30 minutes and wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am, they're finished!

The shell is crunchy, the filling is cheesy and creamy and the taste is out of this world! You can top with some cool sour cream, or pour on hot sauce like the hubby always does :)

As the foil was taken off the pan, I heard a collective "ooooh!" and some "mmmmm's"; people love these things! This recipe makes more than 24 mini-cups, I just saved the rest of the mix for tonight's dinner :)

For the next appetizer, I made some Caprese Skewers! Soooo good and soooo easy!

Here are the four ingredients:

I started by pouring the Balsamic Vinaigrette in my serving dish:

I then washed the tomatoes and basil and chopped the mozzarella cheese into about 1" pieces, thick enough for the skewer to stand up on its own. I also tore the basil leaves into smaller pieces.

I then stuck the tomato on the toothpick, pierced a piece of basil and finished it off with a chunk of mozzarella and plopped it into the wonderful smelling Balsamic dressing:

After a bunch of poking and stabbing, the dish was full!

They were so good! The longer they sit in the dressing, the more the mozzarella soaks up the balsamic flavor. I'm a sucker for some fresh mozzarella. It's very tasty and adds a nice tang to the Caprese Skewer. My Italian in-laws ate these suckers up! But, that's no surprise... it doesn't get any more Italian than mozzarella, tomatoes and basil :)

After the appetizers were all gone, we moved to the beautifully set dining room table in Sean's grandparents gorgeous home and feasted on some vegetables, salad, baked potatoes and some scrumptious prime rib. We also had the most disturbing and hilariously awkward dinner conversation I've ever participated in... I'll leave it up to your imagination to decide what we talked about... just know that I'm scarred for life.

-C Doc