Chicken Bacon Alfredo Puffs

While we've done our fair share of meals inspired by global cuisine or intensive dinners that take hours of preparation, sometimes we just want something quick, delicious, and fatteningly American.

A few weeks back while browsing the frozen section of the grocery store we saw puff pastries filled with chicken, bacon, and alfredo sauce. That sounded right up our alley, but we figured it wouldn't be too hard to make something better (and cheaper) at home, which would also let us put our own twists in there as well. The end result was almost a cross between the pull apart pizza or our roast beef rollups: quick, finger type food that's absolutely delicious.

Chicken and bacon are all well and good, but why not add another of our favorites - mushrooms? Here we're cooking sliced mushrooms and bacon, along with some leftover chicken from a previous meal, in a hot skillet with a few teaspoons of oil.

To make our version of this dinner more exciting (and add some extra vegetables) we also added fresh spinach and diced garlic.

Whipping up homemade alfredo sauce is a snap, and it's much, much better than the canned variety. The trick here is to go simple and use quality ingredients - three to five ingredients is really all you need. Heavy cream, parmesan (don't use the clumpy kind in the plastic bottles unless no other option is available), butter and pepper is all that's necessary for restaurant quality (or better) alfredo sauce.

After all the ingredients have cooked through we spoon the alfredo directly into the skillet to create the puff filling.

Next we rolled out some dough and plopped pieces into a muffin pan. We just used our regular pizza crust recipe because it has a great texture that isn't too soft or too crunchy and is perfect for a doughy meal like this. You could also use any number of refrigerated dough varieties available at the grocery store. After pushing down the dough into the muffin pan, we spoon in just enough of the filling to almost reach the top.

We topped each puff with mozzarella, as that's what we had on hand, but you could jazz this up with pepper jack, muenster, havarti, brie, or any other kind of cheese.

Pop them in the oven for 15 minutes or so and you've got soft, gooey awesomeness ready to eat. Thease are also incredibly versatile, as you could easily swap out which sauce and filling ingredients you use. For one of these I threw in some of our homemade buffalo sauce as well for a spicy element, and it was fantastic.

Pull them apart and eat with your bare hands, or dig in with a fork and work around the gooey center. Yum!