These are basically chocolate chip cookies, but the recipe calls for placing half the morsels on top of the drops of dough. Why? So you can see that the chips are swirled. You're also supposed to add chopped peanuts, but I skipped that step. The recipe said to add extra flour. That makes them a little too crunchy.
"Dinner is deeeelicious."
Did I hear her right? Do I need to have Scrappy's tastebuds checked? This is 99 cent salad because it's set to expire any second. This is super cheap chicken that is probably also about to expire. This is store brand macaroni that I overcooked. It's all eww. But okay. Something other than pizza gets a thumbs up from the Scrappers...
I had been meaning to make this chunk of steak for quite some time. It came out of the freezer on maybe Monday or even Sunday, but didn't go into the oven until today. We didn't get sick. Success!
One night last week, LV said, "You know what we haven't had in a long time? Crab cakes."
While I did a quick mental inventory of what I've been making for dinner the past few months and the reasons why I don't make crab cakes, Scrappy chimed in, "Yeah, it's been a while since we've made them."
I raised an eyebrow. We?
Later that weekend, though, I offered to make crab cakes on Tuesday night. This is not what I was picturing. It's been so long, I looked at the wrong recipes before using the wrong side of the grater. I wanted to make the kind that are finely shredded and need an hour to chill in the refrigerator. These are based more on a recipe for sandwiches from Self.com. They take about ten minutes when you work quickly, shredding your fingers and knuckles along the way.
It will be "a while" before "we" make crab cakes again.
I made a combination of the previous barbecue sauces I'd made before—white vinegar, ketchup, brown sugar, cider vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, hot sauce—and marinated half the leftover pork. Then I made yellow rice with green beans and served it on tostada shells. Easy enough for a Monday.
This is roast chicken breast, penne, frozen chopped kale, and tomatoes. The chicken was still pretty frozen when I stuck it in the roasting pan (I stuck in the freezer after I brought it home from the store because I wasn't sure when I was actually going to do anything with it), which worked out really well. With the lid on, it created a nice little poultry sauna. I threw sliced a lemon in there and everything. It helped create a sauce so this didn't have to be as bland a meal as it could have been.
I wanted to make something for breakfast. No, not really. I wanted to eat freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, but that seemed an inappropriate thing to do with Scrappy around. To set a better example, I made oatmeal muffins with cinnamon streusel topping.
Then I made chocolate chip cookies. (You can tell these were from the last of hte batter because there are no chocolate chips visible.) I didn't give the oven enough time to cool down after the muffins. This batch is a lot crunchier than the previous round.
I found a funny little white hat in one of the baby's drawers. A very nice hand-me-down that nevertheless looks like it belongs to a Smurf because of the built in pocket of air. LV said we should take a picture of the kids in chef hats and bake cookies for his mother's birthday. But what kind of cookies...? We went with butter cookies. Shortbread seemed a little too old lady-ish.
This is boneless center cut pork roast. Something like that. Something that was not listed on the chart for roasting times in the Better Homes & Gardens cookbook. Whatever it was, it was tasty. That's salt, pepper and chili powder for seasoning. The bed of onions and garlic burnt to the pan because the piece wasn't quite fatty enough. But that's okay.
If you've been reading this blog, you're aware by now that I have a stockpile of dried beans I'm making my way through. Today I had my eye on the chick peas. A year ago, Kathie Lee proclaimed on the fourth hour of the Today Show that she loves chick peas. I prepared half the bag. I thought they were disgusting. I couldn't imagine eating them on anything. They grew moldy. I haven't touched them since despite the little voice that keeps saying, "Hummus."
I've had hummus before and liked it. But this was gross. It still tasted like chick peas to me. It's obviously too chunky, but it seemed I would just going to be wasting my time and ingredients by adding peanut butter and fresh garlic and blending the snot out of this batch. It would still taste like chick peas. I asked LV if he wanted some. Obviously, he did not. I ate it with carrots. I spread it on a corn tostada. I toasted it on a flour tortilla. I added garlic salt. I still have a lot of hummus left in the fridge...
We've been avoiding converting any of the leftover chicken, turkey, or steak into dinner. Last night we walked all the way to Wendy's rather than eat leftovers. But tonight I went for it. There was a box of ziti. There were jars of pasta sauce. I had just bought a bag of frozen chopped kale. We could do this. We could make something of this... What I came up with was a super-cheesy leftover poultry baked ziti dish. Kind of light on the sauce, but still good.
I'd been staring down the cupcakes for a few hours, looking for anything else to eat, when it hit me: I could make bread. LV and I were so excited for the bread (not just because it was something tasty from the oven but also because we needed it to finish baking so we could leave) that I completely forgot to take a picture until the next day (which seemed like two or three days later going on baby time). But here it is in all it's baked wonderfulness.
LV said he wanted me to make dinner for Valentine's Day. He would make breakfast. When we looked through the refrigerator, our options for dinner were ground beef, leftover turkey, leftover chicken, or leftover steak. He suggested using the ground beef and leftover tostadas for Mexican pizzas. With some taco seasoning and fresh tomatoes, it didn't feel like we were eating Friday's dinner all over again. Ooh, I forgot to serve the leftover yellow rice. Oh well. We had leftover cupcakes instead.
We're a pretty nerdy bunch, but this week I took it to a whole new level.
"Geography Club" sounded like a good idea to me after I printed a blank map of North America and appeared to be the only person in my house who could identify Greenland. I put the map near the phone where Scrappy likes to hang out, but I didn't really think it was helping her as much as I thought it might have helped me back in 4th grade. I had colored in the states that we get phone calls from. So, if she knows that Arizona and Ohio come up all the time on Caller ID, then she should be able to pick one of them out from the dozen that are colored, right?
Then Luis's website got a hit from Rome, and for some reason that really set things off for me. In the past, we've had "band practice" and "drawing club," and now Scrappy wanted me to teach her how to sew, but I want her to learn to prepare food... A whole integrated curriculum came to mind. Italy. Geography Club could start with Italy and all the other things Scrappy and LV like to do on weekends would fit right in: art, music, food, fashion...
I prepared a Power Point presentation, but only got as far as loading it up with history. (I like history.) There weren't really any great ideas for Italian breakfasts that I could find in the short search that I did. Scrambled egg pizzas kept coming up. I never have yeast and I didn't want to go buy dough, so I made one gigantic biscuit instead to use as the crust. It didn't cross my mind until much later that this would be the equivalent to eating a dozen biscuits. Perhaps I should have cut the recipe in half... (Those are red peppers.)
For lunch, I wanted to melt cheese on a tostada. I chose the toaster oven instead of the microwave. I chose wrong.
After thawing a container of leftover turkey, I didn't really know what to do with it. The baby and I headed to the grocery store, found a big stack of tostada shells, and decided that was the way to go. With some yellow rice, everyone was happy.
Those lemon-coconut bars taste like a combination of Trix cereal and coconut donuts, so the tray is almost gone now. I decided to use the last of the cake mixes—Devil's Food cake—to make cupcakes. Then I made my own butter cream frosting with hot cocoa mix (why look for unsweetened chocolate powder). Sadly, Scrappy will not be here for several days. I keep running through scenarios for how to package one of these cupcakes in order to get it to her without it being ruined. It could be quite the happy Valentine's Day to her.
The clock is ticking very loudly the whole time you're cooking with an infant. Do I have time to go look up that recipe for the rub? No. I should have written it down last time. Do I have time to look at a recipe at all? Probably not. Baby isn't really about to give me the time to even lay the ingredients out on the counter. He began wailing as soon as I picked up the first garlic clove. Going from memory and without measuring utensils, I think this turned out well.
While the chicken in this picture did come from from some rather large portions, they turned out to not be as ridiculously over-sized as I would have hoped. (Leftovers are fun...) There was quite a bit of bone.
Hooray! I finally got to turn that leftover chicken into a pot pie. This is part of the chicken that was leftover from the last whole chicken I roasted. I added too many potatoes to my new and improved (and more filling) version, so there is still more chicken leftover. (Which is good because I'm kind of tired of peanut butter and jelly for lunch.)
"It looks like a pie," LV said. So, click click click. I took a picture to remember. The crust was really good this time. I think it was combination of giving it enough of enough baking time with better prep work.
Apparently Target had baking ingredients on sale. LV brought me one bag of chocolate chips two weeks ago. "Don't you want cookies every week?" I asked. I sent him back for more of anything the following week. He brought me coconut flakes. What can I do with coconut flakes... We had a box of lemon cake mix in the cabinet from when cake mix had gone on sale. I hunted around for a recipe that would tell me how to turn cake mix into cookie bars (luckily, I had been tempted by the peanut butter fudge bars on the side of the yellow cake mix box), and then mixed the coconut flakes with vanilla frosting. Scrappy thought it was delish. But she's not shy about complimenting her own cooking. This was the first time in forever that I had her bake with me. (Her and the baby and LV. It was a family affair.) I kind of like making cookies alone...
I made this steak on... Wednesday? Yeah. It's been a busy week. I made steak Wednesday, but LV called to ask if I wanted him to bring anything home for dinner. So I told him to bring something to go with the steak—two gigantic bone-in cuts that were slowly baking in the oven. He brought fried rice and egg rolls. Then the next day we had pizza. Then today we had the steak again. (I wanted to make chicken pot pie, but with only $5 on me, I couldn't really get all the vegetables and chicken broth. Tomorrow. I'll make chicken pot pie tomorrow.) Again, I didn't feel like putting much effort into the sides, so here we have plain egg noodles with plain frozen green beans with plain (but really tasty (I took my time comparing cuts this week)) steak. Borrrrring.
Finally, those homemade meatballs I was talking about... The recipe says to roll out 24, but I wanted big honking meatballs. I made eight. Usually I buy the pre-made turkey version, which comes with maybe a dozen per pack. For the low low price of half as much, I was able to buy double the weight in ground beef and come away with meatballs that left everyone satisfied. Plus the other half of my ground beef pack. Plus two real lunches. There are never enough meatballs leftover from the turkey version to make TWO lunches. It's usually just one sketch lunch. But with REAL meatballs, I was able to turn eight into five meals. Nice.
I saw this picture in the hopper and thought, Didn't I already post the turkey? Oh, that's right. I used up more of the leftover cranberry BBQ sauce on leftover pernil and fresh egg noodles. ("Fresh" in the sense that I just boiled them. Not that I just rolled them out by hand. I haven't begun making pasta yet. There are too many things to try long before that.) Between the pernil and the BBQ sauce, there was a whole lot of flavor going on in this dish.
