Spaghetti Carbonara

Another great recipe I made this week is Spaghetti Carbonara from Kraft Recipes.

I was reluctant to review a recipe from Kraft because I was thinking it's Kraft, I am sure it is good. However, the 3 star review made me wonder.

Lets start with the bad. The sauce is very sticky and the pasta becomes a giant ball of noodles. As you can tell from the photos, my sauce isn't nearly as creamy as the photo on the kraft website. After adding some milk, the sauce thinned out and was easy to eat then.

The great news- the sauce flavor is fabulous. The zesty Italian dressing gives a distinct, tangy and seasoned flavor to the cheese sauce that was great. My family loved this recipe and with a few tweaks, the recipe is definitely worth making again.

General Tso's Chicken

The recipe I prepared over the weekend was General Tso's Chicken.

General Tso's Chicken is a sweet and spicy dish found on just about every chinese restaurant's menu in the country. The problem with recreating such a popular dish is that every chinese restaurant has their own take on the sauce, breading and technique, making it impossible to have a set recipe.

This recipe starts off great. The slurry for the chicken uses corn starch rather than flour, which already made a huge difference compared to other recipes I have tried. My family was drooling just seeing the chicken coming out of the fryer.

The sauce was easy to put together and I was able to prepare it much earlier in the day to allow the dinner process to go faster. The flavor the vinegar brought to the sauce was not like the General Tso's I have had around here, but still yielded an asian flavor to the dish. With the acidity from the vinegar, one could easily add orange zest and a bit of juice and had a rich orange chicken dish.

Overall, my family gave this recipe a two thumbs up and I will definitely be saving this pin to my favorite board.