Today I actually used my Cooking for Dummies book. The first time I've ever looked something up in it during the 8 years it's moved around the country with me. LV was completely taken by a commercial for Anytizers. The next time we were near a freezer section, I pointed them out to him. What do you serve with your Anytizers? I had brussels sprout in the fridge and no idea how to properly cook them. Dummies to the rescue...
Pasta was on a crazy sale, but most of the boxes seemed to be ziti. I've never used ziti for anything, so I was really excited to find a baked ziti recipe. Like lasagna, there seem to be an infinite number of ways to produce baked ziti. This is a combination of a Martha Stewart Everyday Food recipe (which was poor sauce over cooked ziti and bake) and a more labor-intensive recipe (combine seven pounds of fresh vegetables and Italian sausage to create your own sauce before baking). I was happy with the results. So were Scrappy and LV. But I was really happy. All that ziti fed my Italian food craving for a week.
There's chicken in there, but mostly there's a lot of fresh asparagus and cherry tomatoes tossed with penne and LV's new favorite cream sauce.
Ever since I had to make a big breakfast before a day of shooting last week, I've been on a kick with making eggs for breakfast. LV wanted to get in on that, so this is his pre-work breakfast.
Then we had more eggs for dinner. They were going to expire soon, we didn't have any rice, and I was tired of pasta. Hence, a gigantic omelet for the three of us. (Although really I shouldn't be eating omelets...)
This is the "What do I have in the house that I can turn into dinner" meal. A box of spaghetti, the last tomato, whatever vegetables were left in the freezer... Voila. Dinner.
Why make life difficult on myself? I've wanted to make chicken kiev again for a long time, but it's such a time consuming process. Pathmark had frozen chicken kiev. Mmm... Perfect.
Thursday night we went shopping and I saw a bottle of dressing I wanted to try. We never have dressing in the house, but raspberry vinaigrette sounded good. At lunch I decided to try it with all the green peppers, mushrooms, and cucumbers I had on hand. I diced them up, but thought they looked kind of sad. So I added the little bit of pasta left from earlier in the week.
I seem to have forgotten an ingredient in these muffins... I was so excited to make muffins with big frozen blueberries, and then I forgot to add the baking powder. They look like bricks, but they taste okay. A little solid. Like a weird scone.
Luckily the rest of dinner was better. (And the muffins did get eaten.) I thought this might be an overload of fresh vegetables for one day, but it actually didn't taste that way. (There is a lot of turkey hidden in there.) Yay for me...
LV really wanted some cookies around the house. Scrappy has been sick, though, which limits when I can make cookies. (I don't want her help if she's coughing on them, but I also don't want to be obviously baking without her...) Thursday finally felt like a good day. Happy Abe Lincoln's birthday.
"What should I make for dinner...?"
"Fettuccine."
"As long as you don't call it 'fetachine.'"
This time I made the whole box of fettuccine, thinking that would leave LV with leftovers to take to work. But the increase in sauce didn't work out so well. I mean, you could say it was more satiny, like the cook book describes it, but I would call it runny. I think I used too much milk and too little cheese. LV appreciated it. And stuck to his end of the deal.
Cherry tomatoes, red onions, and enough steak to leave LV with lunch to take later in the week. This baked in the oven at a low temperature for an hour or two before hitting the grill.
The green peppers at the grocery store looked really good this week, so I bought a bunch. I'm sure there are more creative things that could be done with green peppers, but the little pre-cut pieces of steak looked good, hence stir-fry. Well, they looked good before this picture. Here they're kind of colorless and sad. Over yellow rice, though, it wasn't as bland as it looks.
Feed me... I swear the food processor is calling to me. This time I used cherries, mangoes, pineapple, melon, and skim milk, and then blended it for much longer than last time. It was much easier to drink.
Dinner was back to boring grilled chicken. Nothing fun to spice it up. (But it still tasted good.)
I set aside some of the guacamole ingredients to use as burger topping later in the week because LV had raved about the magic that an avocado can add to a burger. Unfortunately, there wasn't a whole lot of leftover ground beef to work with for making burgers. There was almost more avocado than burger...
Avocados were on sale, so our Super Bowl Sunday started with guacamole. I think my avocados were too small. Or maybe I just added too much lime juice. Either way, I ate plenty of it.
Next up, figuring Scrappy wouldn't want to eat wings, I made bagel bites and pigs in a blanket (the last of the leftovers from her party).
Then I made potato skins. I think they were better than the last time I made them. That could be because there were so many fewer to deal with.
Last, but not least, I made wings. The bigger grocery store seems to have access to bigger chickens. You can't tell in this picture just how much bigger they were, but I only made half any many as I normally do because there was twice at much meat.
