LV and I had hit Target the night before and bought a bag of candy bars. In general, nothing we'd been eating all week was very healthy, so, when I went to the grocery store to look for something to make for dinner, I decided to buy a bunch of vegetables for salad. While we heard one trick-or-treater complain several times that he needed real food, we were okay and out for much longer than our first year in this neighborhood.
This week the grocery store had wings, so I made my fake teriyaki flavor. They were saucy.
For dinner, we had steak. You can't tell from the picture how much hemming and hawing went into this meal. I didn't feel like ordering out again, but I also didn't feel like making dinner. There were too many dishes already stacked up, but we couldn't eat just steak. We ended up just creating a lot of dirty dishes and having a nice dinner.
Scrappy wanted to help with cubing mangoes. Her way of helping is to eat every other slice and tell me how our cooking show is going. It was far more entertaining than cooking by myself and much more tame than the witches and uncontrollable dancing spells that were involved in baking cookies.
Although she helped make the rice, Scrappy was not involved in grilling the pork. I think she was also surprised by the addition of ginger and cinnamon to the mangoes she'd cut.
Scrappy had been asking about cookies for weeks. Cookies hadn't been high on my list of "fun things to do" for a quite a while, but I decided to go ahead and bake Halloween cookies. This time I prepared the Pillsbury sugar cookie recipe and let it sit in the refrigerator for three hours. That worked out much better than the mix we'd used before.
Scrappy decorated the cookies with powdered sugar frosting topped with more powdered sugar frosting covered in fistfuls of colored sugar crystals. Sweet and crunchy would be good ways to describe the results. I left a tray undecorated. Mmm...
I felt we needed some vegetables (a lot, really), but didn't feel like eating frozen green beans. All we had in the fridge was green squash. So, I cut it all up and threw it in with the sauce. It was... okay.
I didn't grow up on Hamburger Helper, so whenever I hear the name I picture burgers like ketchup and mustard and french fries kind of "hamburger." I had a sirloin burger leftover in one container and pasta leftover in another. I decided to combine them for lunch. With some ketchup and relish. Why not...
I really wanted to make chocolate chip cookies. The night before a shoot probably isn't the time be making cookies, but it's what I really wanted to do. Plus we didn't have any Oreos left.
The first football season we watched from home, LV and I ate a lot of sandwiches and chips. The second season, we ate wings every Sunday and there wasn't much of a spread. Last season, I worked every Sunday. This season, we can't really count on wings being available at the grocery store. So, I've had to get more creative.
I didn't want to do sandwiches again this week, so I bought a couple pounds of ground beef and made sliders for every game. Without dinner rolls as buns, this idea might not have worked. Not that it was really the idea I'd imagined. I was thinking of turning each burger into a different flavor--salsa, BBQ, etc.--but I only ate two and LV only put ketchup on his. He said that when the burger is good, it doesn't need anything else.
Once upon a time, our grocery store had Hormel pork tenderloin. It was the greatest thing ever. Then they never ordered it again. (The same way they seem to have only ever had one shipment of good frozen pizzas or refuse to sell anymore chicken wings this football season.)
This week they had all kinds of prepared meats. None of them were pork tenderloin, but this particular roll didn't seem to have as much cheese as the beef pinwheels (shh... I told LV there was *no* cheese in this), so we bought... whatever this called. It's an Italian pork. I baked it for 40 minutes and served it with pasta. I was afraid it would be super dry and plain without a sauce, but it was actually good.
The grocery store had ready-to-grill sirloin beef patties that looked really good. So I bought the package with no real idea how or when I would use them. By the end of the week, it was obvious we needed to use up the rest of the bread. Hence, patty melts. I think the half Scrappers had might have been a bit too much for her. That or all the BBQ chips.
Last year, I didn't pay attention to what was growing the backyard. We received lots of tomatoes (all delicious) from our downstairs neighbor, but I didn't pay attention to anything else back there. Then I started working with models, and we had to wonder what was all over the ground. Last month, a model noticed the figs. She said we should be eating them. The next week, we received a platter of figs from our neighbor. The day after that, Martha Stewart cooked with the author of Platter of Figs. I couldn't cook with the figs I'd received, though. They turned moldy too quickly. The next time, I put them in the fridge immediately and prepared them for dinner that night. LV was not a fan--too mushy and the stems freaked him out. I would eat them again.
LV, who usually doesn't notice that I didn't bother to trim off the fat, said, "This is really fatty, huh?" I don't think that even begins to describe those cuts...
None of the salad at the store looked good, so I bought a bag of ready-to-serve "more creative" salad. "More creative" because it includes toasted almonds and dried cranberries and some vinaigrette. (LV has forgotten more things than most people will ever know, but he dug out the correct spelling of vinaigrette. That one "stood" in his brain.) I added the strawberries and turkey. Done.
I almost forgot! I made corn muffins to go with this. That made it see more filling.
These are sausages and peppers... There's not much to say, except that this time I actually made it all in a pan instead on the grill. The main difference there was that I got bored quickly and tried to serve the sausage while it was still uncooked. Kind of gross...
We bought two pounds of wings, so, for the Monday night game, we had more wings. I felt they should be part of a meal of junk food, hence nachos. (Note there is still portfolio work in the background...)
This is the grease left behind by the plate of wings that LV has deemed the greatest wings ever made. I'm noticing a pattern: When I don't take a picture, it's the greatest thing LV's ever eaten.
I didn't want to eat KFC, so we bought the box of frozen fried chicken and can of biscuits. Then I mixed a leftover red onion half with green squash and a tomato. The biscuits were probably the best part.
The minimal effort continued as I grilled steak with egg noodles. Vegetables? Who needs them. They take time.
The only thing easier than Hamburger Helper is a frozen meal. I'm in the middle of retouching for my portfolio and LV's in the middle of making changes for freelance clients, so we went to the grocery store, picked up a Bertolli bag of frozen sausage and peppers (I think) and dumped it on the stove. Again, I forgot all about it and let it burn to the bottom of the skillet. Oops... But, again, the burn wasn't all that noticeable.
