Chicken Bacon Wraps, Bean Salad, and Mashed Potatoes

For dinner we had some really great recipes. The first recipe, Sweet Chicken Bacon Wraps from Paula Deen were such a big hit, they disappeared before I could take a picture.  These were delicious, fast to eat, and fun.  Look at the link for a picture, that's just what they look like.  Aaron gave them a perfect 10, the boys and I gave them a 9.  I wish I would've salted the chicken before wrapping it in bacon, but other than that I thought they were awesome.  The calories for the recipe the way it was written are for 24 rolls, about 63 calories per roll.  They are actually much less than that though, because I used maybe 1/4 of the brown sugar mixture, which would lower the calories quite a bit.  Fun and not too calorific!  We like that kind of food around here. :)

Next comes our veggie.  My parents brought me a bunch of veggies from their garden, so I looked for a recipe online that would use both zucchini and green beans, but wasn't a soup.  There aren't that many, surprisingly.  This Keeping up with the Beans salad was delicious, and uses tons of veggies, so we really liked it.  We gave it a 9, and the dressing was great.  I used less than it called for, especially less balsamic vinegar, because we're not huge fans of vinegar around here.  Anyway, this is a great salad to make for all those veggies coming out of your ears days.  The calories will vary based on what kinds of veggies you use, but for 10 servings, ours was 189 calories per serving, and they are big servings.

Last of all we had some garlic mashed potatoes.  They are Guy Fieri's Johnny Garlic's Famous Garlic and Rosemary Mashed Potatoes.  The boys and I really liked them, but Aaron said they had a funky flavor.  Go figure.  I'm not sure what was wrong.  The boys and I gave them 8, and Aaron gave them a 4.  Oh well.  I cut the garlic down to 4 cloves rather than 4 tablespoons of garlic, and I only used 1 T olive oil, and only 6 potatoes, rather than 5 pounds of potatoes.  We got six servings out of this, and each serving was 143 calories.  Hopefully you'll like these as much as the boys and I did, and not like Aaron did :)

Tomorrow we're having shrimp fried rice and fried zucchini.