Veggie Pizza

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.

Wings

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...

Overnight Broil pt 2

Making dinner the day before might be the best thing ever. Next to instant mashed potatoes. And LV.

Peaches and Pork

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.

Steak Quesadilla

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...

Chicken Strips

"You know what's really good that we haven't had in a while?"

"What?" I ask, while digging into the refrigerator.

"The tasty chicken," LV says. He then takes it back and says we have had the chicken strips on a regular basis, but he's made them and often forgotten some of the ingredients.

"Okay. I'll make that." I had the right kind of chicken in the meat drawer. They're fast. No problem. And just to make life easier on myself (and because I've broken half the shallow dishes LV used to have), I decided to bread everything in a mixing bowl. Fewer Ritz crackers spilled, more Ritz crackers on the chicken, still a pretty bland picture... But LV was happy.

Spaghetti (with new cookware)

We received a lovely 10-piece set of cookware in July that I didn't really put to use until September. So, even though this wasn't very difficult (store bought heat-and-serve meatballs), I had the pleasure of using matching and correctly sized pots. Yay.

Yolanda's Tomatoes

Our downstairs neighbor grows the best tomatoes and then gives them to us. I decided to try slow cooking a London broil again. This time I didn't leave it in the oven over night. Hence, the tomatoes are still red.

Labor Day

After eating leftover hot dogs and wings for lunch at my parents, we hit the Dairy Queen on our way out of town. Mmmm... Waffle turtle sundae.

Illinois Reception

This little guy was hanging out, waiting for the party.

And it looks like this little lady was also just hanging out, waiting for the party. But she came in and helped me slice up tons of things. (If only we hadn't doubled and tripled the recipes...)

Good Housekeeping had a really enticing article on picnic foods. The recipes were meant to serve 8. Doubling the recipe looks like it's meant to serve 8 families. There were two platters like this...

This is the tarragon vinaigrette. I think I tried it. It sounded good. And I had to look all over for fresh tarragon leaves. We had some traditional onion dip, too. Or maybe it was ranch.

I was definitely too busy arranging shrimp skewers and trying to finish the 216 wings to sit down and eat a giant bowl of carrots. I should have placed a dollar bill next to the bowl for scale...

This wasn't what my mom wanted. Trays of shrimp with cocktail sauce in the middle were on sale. I said they looked sketchy and bought a bag of frozen shrimp instead.

You'll notice the lack of pictures of wings. I made them in buffalo, plain, chipotle and extra spicy varieties. I think only three of the nine packages actually went into the broiler. I had a lot of sangria.

I had cake, too. Although the invitations my mom sent out misspelled LV's name, the cake was correct. And tasty.

Labor Day Prep

There were lots and lots of things to slice while I was in my mother's kitchen by myself. These were for the sangria that needed to sit a day.

My mother decided the best menu would be enough chicken wings to feed an army and bratwurst. I see that as an appetizer and a side item... Prepping wings usually calls for a 2-cup Pyrex measuring cup, but there was not one available. So, I used this coffee mug. I can picture that coffee mug in every kitchen my family's lived in.

This is how packed the fridge was the day before the Illinois reception. I don't think the fridge was this packed with food when my mom threw a surprise 40th birthday party for my dad. (The last good party she hosted far too many years ago.)

1. Hot dogs The bratwurst she wanted to buy from Butera looked disgusting, so she opted for too many packs of hot dogs. Her original plan was to make macaroni & cheese for all the kids. At a BBQ? Kids eat hot dogs. (And Scrappy wasn't a fan of mac & cheese yet.)

2. Encore Cases and cases of cheap soda were crammed into the fridge. Cheap soda, fine. But to take up all that real estate for something that could be chilled in the cooler the next day? The entire shelf was filled with cans.

3. Tobasco Most of one large bottle goes into a batch of wings. I'm surprised there aren't more bottles of Tobasco in this picture. I ended up buying two or three more after this photo was taken.

4. Wings We bought 9 packages of a dozen wings that morning. After my mom emphatically told me about how much more experience she has with party planning than I do and that there were 30!! people coming, I turned the volume off on the little voice in my head that kept saying, "This is ridiculous." So, after visiting every grocery store in town to see who had the best deal, we were panicking that there weren't "enough" packages left at the first store by the time we came back to it. Four packages wouldn't do. We needed nine. Nine package of 12 wings that would be cut into two smaller wings each for 30 people my mom hasn't attempted to feed since my dad turned 40... Somewhere on mute, the little voice was saying, "This is ridiculous." And that was before I attempted to use an old coffee mug and a dull knife to turn frozen packages of wings (because five had to come from the freezer) into something delectable.

5. Carrots You can't see the six pounds (seriously) of potato salad hidden in the fridge, so I'll just point to the ridiculous amount of carrots.

6. Lemonade My mom really wanted lemonade. I don't know anyone who drinks it besides her. It was on sale buy-one-get-one-free, so there are two in the fridge.

7. Taco Dip Blue Goose apparently makes a mean taco dip. I don't know if I had any... It was yet another grocery store in town to hit that.

8. Berries I bought a few too many raspberries and strawberries for the sangria. Some of the strawberries went into a Jell-o salad. But that's a lot of berries.