Surprising sources.

Keeping cooking fun for me means trying new dishes. While there's no shortage of recipes floating around out there, it can be tricky to find ones that are:

1. Inexpensive to make.
2. Healthy, yet kid friendly.
3. Fairly easy - meaning, they don't require more than 8 or 10 ingredients, too many dishes and pans, or take more than 30 minutes to prepare.

Mark and I are addicted to Food Network and love to watch the TV chefs prepare amazing meals - but I wish that just once, I'd see someone make something with ground beef.

My sis-in-law, Bees, is an awesome cook and once, after I went on an on raving about her Greek Cous Cous Salad, she let me in on one of her little secrets.

Look for the recipes on the labels of different foods.

Turns out, her amazing salad was a recipe she found on the back of the cous cous box. She may have varied it a little, but she used the box's recipe as a starting point.

Building on this idea, I now look for different manufacturer's websites for recipes. Many of them have great recipe-builder tools that allow you to check off ingredients you have on hand to find recipes.

My latest find comes from the Rice-A-Roni folks. Their Recipe Wizard tool is pretty neat. I used it to make their Fajita Skillet Supper, which ended up being pretty good. And I paired it with my own ho-made cheese quesadillas.

Fajita Skillet Supper

Toasty quesadillas from the broiler.

The Verdict. In the end, this recipe only earned 3 spatulas because it was a little on the bland side. (Usually rice mixes are salty, but this one wasn't.) I'll definitely make it again, but next time, I'll add some spices and maybe even some diced jalapeno.

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PS - I know I've been bad about updating Seriously Skinny blog, but it's not because I haven't been doing well. I've actually been working out and have kicked a bad habit. You can read about it here if you'd like.