LV requested chicken strips for dinner on New Year's Eve. He said that 2007 went really well after we started it with chicken strips, hence we should repeat.
We didn't repeat with champagne, though. Instead we picked out a bottle of sparkling grape-apple juice with Scrappy. I think she's the only child I've ever met who hates sweets. You would think we asked her to drink turpentine when we toasted the new year.
I never thought it would take so long to make Swedish meatballs again... But here we are like a year later with the encore of Swedish meatballs. Just as well received the second time. After Scrappy claimed she had never had them before. It's been a long time.
We waited until the last minute to make cookies for Santa.
But it was actually less stressful than last year, the first time we attempted gingerbread cookies.
Before rolling out the dough and baking the cookies, Scrappy had to make it through dinner: steak with an assortment of vegetables.
Green squash, tomatoes, onions, celery...
In an attempt to come up with something good for dinner at the last minute, I pulled out rotini, tuna, cashews, capers, milk and corn starch. Then I told Scrappy that it was like Tuna Helper. Except better.
Now, I wouldn't say that I sabotaged the store-bought cake to make sure that my homemade cake looked just as good on the blog... But I can say that b/c it wasn't me who put the ice cream cake in the refrigerator instead of the freezer after buying it.
This is what ice cream cake looks like when you let it sit on the counter a little too long...
Me and a bottle of pinot grigio made this revival of Italian wedding pasta the night of a company holiday party. Luckily, the leftovers are quite tasty...
Our grocery store only sells two kinds of chicken breast--really thinly sliced pieces that always look like filets of fish on this blog or thicker pieces still stuck to the chest cavity of the chicken. On this day, I decided to sautee the chicken just as fast I normally would, but this time used more than just salt and pepper so that it actually look like chicken--not fish.
LV's quiet birthday consisted of Domino's Hawaiian thin crust pizza and a freshly baked homemade 99-cent cake. Mmm... If only I hadn't tried to frost the cake 20 minutes after it came out of the oven. (We were sort of crunched for time--Scrappy had to go to bed.)
We were supposed to decorate the tree, so I made chicken nuggets with frozen artichoke hearts. "Frozen artichoke hearts" are as bad as they sound. Even worse when they're a generic brand.
Chicken Pot Pie made it's long-awaited comeback, and it was better than the original. Though, cutting slits was not the same as cutting shapes because it did not leave enough room for steam. Now I have to clean potpie filling off the bottom of the oven.
This is close up of the bread. It was baked for an extra long time because I accidentally added twice as much pumpkin as necessary to the batter. So, none of it tasted burnt, it just took a long time to bake all the way through...
On Wednesday (or was it Tuesday?) I made pumpkin bread, pumpkin cake, and pumpkin muffins. (There was a lot of batter.) I decided the muffins could go to Thanksgiving dinner, the bread would stay at the house, and the cake need to be frosted to be a better coffee cake. LV is no sourcream or creamcheese fan, so I made buttercream frosting. Mmm...
So, we started the day with cake. We being LV and I; Scrappy still has an aversion to eating pumpkin.
Next I made a pie. It took a little longer to look cooked than the directions stated. Not too much longer. I was kind of surprised the knife came out clean when I did test it.
The pie was supposed to cool for two hours. That was plenty of time to make a new batch of candied yams and apples to bring to Thanksgiving dinner. The pie didn't look quite the same after an hour, though. It was cracking, falling away from the crust and sweating. It tasted good...
So, Tuesday we found out we were assigned sweet potatoes for Scrappy's Wednesday potluck Thanksgiving with her second grade class. I've never made yams or sweet potatoes before. My mother raves about her own recipe for candied pecan yams, but opening a can seemed kind of gross. I wanted to wash and peel and chop and boil and bake and generally make things more difficult for myself. Although, I did have LV do the scrubbing.
When Scrappy awoke on Wednesday morning, there was a bucket of sweet potatoes with apples ready for her to take to class.
I saw a package of Hormel prepared pork tenderloin and thought that could be another good alternative to the usual LV breaded and baked pork. Lucky for me, I was home to make the pork that Tuesday.
Those are brussel sprouts. A new food in the Scrappy rotation.
I bought a package of arugula at the beginning of the week, and then completely forgot to eat it for lunch each day. So, I had a lot of arugula about to go bad... This was dinner--arugula with potato chips and leftover crab topped with what was left of a Newman's Own Mustard dressing. A lot less gross than it sounds, but not nearly as good as lunch.
Leftover pork and apples served hot over arugula, onions, raisins, and Newman's Own Mustard-something-or-other-dressing.
The more traditional HappiestPuppies shot...
Lucky for LV there was huge pile of dishes to be washed when he got home from work. Otherwise he might have eaten one these burgers raw instead of waiting for it to cook slowly in the toaster oven.
LV made this the night before. He didn't want to keep battering and baking pork, so I found this recipe in the 20-minute section of the cookbook. It was similar to the pear + pork recipe, but with a different flavor of apples and thyme.
The good thing about freelancing is that I can surprise LV with homemade dinner. After hearing about his un-fun day at the office, I can be waiting with crabcakes. Yay for food...
Nothing makes me feel less like cooking than standing around in cold all day, photographing the marathon. So, we had the "I don't feel like trying" Sunday dinner of chicken, broccoli and Jiffy mix corn muffins.
So, again, I'm rifling through the drawers in the fridge, trying to figure out what I should do with what I have going to waste. The night before, I'd wanted to make buffalo wings (they looked good on screen), but they were too frozen (because I hadn't used the pack the Sunday I was supposed to). So, we had frozen fish sticks and frozen French fries and pizza rolls. I felt like making something more palatable.
The cookbook I use has a recipe for cranberry and fig chutney with pork medallions. I had no cranberries, figs, rosemary or pork medallions. But I had apple juice and pork chops. Hence, pears boiled in apple juice with ginger, nutmeg and cloves on top of broiled pork and rice. Mmm... So much better.
One of the many recipes I marked in the cook book at the beginning of the year was for stuffed shells. They looked so good. But I never had time or a reason. (LV's not a big cheese fan, so to eat a meal of cheese and spinach seemed to be asking too much.)
I decided that, along with chicken pot pie, I was going to make stuffed shells. I would make casseroles during the day that could be popped into the oven at night for dinner. Yeah, because I suddenly have so much time to dwell in the kitchen... I made the shells one night and took a picture with the new camera and the point-and-shoot.
This is the point-and-shoot's picture.
Ever since the first time I made chicken pot pie, I've wanted to make it again. But it was too hot during the summer. As soon as it turned colder, I started telling myself it was time to make chicken pot pie. Weeks went by before I bought the ingredients. Then I just didn't have the time. We were way too hungry to wait through 50 minutes of prep time and 30 minutes of baking. So, I stir fried the fresh red peppers, celery, mushrooms, and onions that were supposed to go into the pot pie and made some rice. Then I cursed the chicken for not cooking in the microwave fast enough.
I don't know what I had for dinner that day, but I definitely was testing out my new lens with my new camera. I was so in love with both until I noticed all the noise in my blacks...
This is more steak that spent some quality time in the oven. This seems to be about the time I put a giant finger print on the lens of the point-and-shoot which then created a lovely haze in about 100 pictures.
We didn't know what to make for dinner, so we went to the store and bought a taco kit. Except, we didn't have a pound of ground beef. We had 2 cups of pre-cooked chicken. It wasn't really a problem, just a lot of extra seasoning.
First, I warmed up the tortillas in foil in the oven. Then I decided that it would be a waste to throw out all that foil, so I heated up the chips in the foil in the oven. Soon I'll start re-using dryer sheets...
I had pork and lots of mushrooms. So, I took the recipe for mushroom sauce and chicken in the Better Homes & Gardens cookbook and tweaked it. It was much more edible than it appears.
We had bought a ton of vegetables when we went grocery shopping and not used them all week. So, why eat a plain frozen pizza when I could thrown all the vegetables on top? It made for a really filling dinner, but Scrappy got her serving of vegetables and usual weekly frozen pizza.
After so many wings on Labor Day, I just don't look at them the same way anymore. I couldn't even take a decent picture of the first football batch...
Making dinner the day before might be the best thing ever. Next to instant mashed potatoes. And LV.
We had pork and steak that both needed to be cooked. Plus, a bunch of peaches that needed to be eaten. So, I stir fried some pork and tomatoes and peaches while the steak went into the oven for a very long time at a very low temperature.
I love the toaster oven. It's the handiest thing in the house when we get home late and only have leftovers in the fridge. This is Yolanda's Tomatoes + Tortillas. Mmm...
