Bacon Wrapped New Year

When we invited LV's family to come over for brunch the day after Christmas, I thought I would make mini quiches and a ham and I don't know what else. They declined the offer, but I still wanted to try making mini quiches. So I made them on New Year's Eve (and added way too much salt). Luckily, one of the recipes I found online said that they freeze really well. The three of us weren't about to eat two dozen of these before midnight.

Mini quiches seemed appropriate because I wanted to try wrapping bacon around anything, and bacon and eggs go well together, right? So, I just had to decide what I was going to wrap the bacon around (after I found which store had bacon on sale). Apples became my answer. (Again, I have a lot of time to ponder life's mysteries...) Apples are cheap and they would give it that sweet-salty combo. And if that didn't work well enough, then there would always be mozzarella sticks... wrapped in bacon.

The heartburn was pretty extraordinary. But bacon wrapped goodies are still tasty the next day during your Buffy the Vampire Slayer marathon.

Boring. It's what's for dinner.

Grilled chicken, frozen green beans, and some pasta. Yawn...

Yum Salad Revisited

It's the now infamous combination of ready-made grilled chicken, strawberries, blueberries, spring greens, walnuts and so on. This time there's some nectarines for kicks.

Pork with Orange Ginger Sauce

This was a second more successful attempt at mixing oranges with pork. Probably because I used a real recipe instead of just making something up as I went along. Much better.

Who knows...

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...

Pork + Crab

I didn't know if I felt like having pork or steak, so I made both. I didn't know what I felt like serving with the pork, so we had the leftover pasta salad. It was an indecisive day...

An Attempt to Clean Out the Fridge

We bought a lot of food. There was no plan of attack like, "We can eat this twice, we can eat that tice..." We just bought enough food to feed a family of four for week. A family of four we are not.

Above is my attempt to use up the leftover tacos from Monday night (I forgot to take a picture) in one salad. It's the equivalent of putting two big tacos in a bowl with half a head of lettuce.

I'm surprised I ate even that much. LV had the leftover steak and a hamburger bun. Because our hamburger meat had gone into make tacos, we needed to figure out how to use up the buns...

After lunch, we took a walk and noticed the grills had been repositioned. A new sign said, "Matches or flame needed to ignite." A big lighter for the grill was not one of the perks included with our condo rental.

Unable to grill the pork, I once again got out the frying pan. There was half a stick of butter left, and I was going to use it up.

Well, not quite all of it. That would have been gross. Almost as gross as eating half a bag of frozen green beens in one sitting (shown above).

There was a pretty full package of shredded cheese, but I didn't use more than necessary on the hamburger buns I put in the broiler. I completely forgot about the onion, grape tomatoes, and olives until right before we sat down. We decided to skip them with dinner. I had black olives for breakfast to try to finish them. The onion and shriveled and grape tomatoes went in the trash.

Probably the most creative thing we did with leftovers was earlier in the week when LV suggested mixing the artichoke dip with a can of tuna to make tuna salad sandwiches on hamburger buns. Again, no picture...

Steak, Not Grilled

Grilling was supposed to be one of the perks to renting a condo. So, shortly after arriving in Sanibel, LV and I stocked up on all sorts of things to grill. First the weather didn't cooperate, then we couldn't get the gas grills to light. We followed the directions, nothing happened. I had yellow rice on the stove, so we had to abandon the grills for a searing and baking technique.

Crunchy Chicken Strips

By special request, I turned the week's chicken into "Little Strips of Goodness." Forgetting that I run out of breading three-quarters of the way through, I started double-coating the first few pieces. So, as in December, there were some place strips. But that was fine--Scrappy wasn't about to complain about the lack of thyme on her chicken.

Breakfast, "Yum Salad," and Strawberry Cookies

Sausage patties used to be something we had all the time at the old apartment. We never have them anymore. One opened package has been sitting in the freezer since probably before I started this blog. (Which, to clarify, was sometime in December...)

So, sausage patties seemed like a fresh idea. And we always scramble eggs, so, weee, today was fried. One of these weekends we'll get back to making toad-in-a-hole. (Not the traditional English recipe--just the eggs and toast you see in V for Vendetta.)

Pizza was again requested for dinner, but we had finally shopped for the menu I made up like a month ago, so I refused to give in to a salad-less dinner. When I started saying there would be chicken and strawberries, the pizza discussion went away. Although, I can't say that all the work that LV put into shredding the chicken was somehow easier than putting a pizza in the oven.

Luckily Scrappy did not echo the "I hate lettuce" sentiments of her father. Her declaration that she likes lettuce was not just lip service either. She actually ate everything on her plate.

The strawberries and blueberries must have had her fooled. When I said that I had finally and thoroughly ended LV's streak of never having had a salad for a meal, she said this was not a salad. After reconsidering her plate, Scrappy said, "It's a yum salad."

These are strawberry cookies. When we were all done baking after dinner and I was scraping puffy pale cookies, I angrily stated I'm never making these cookies again. Even though the sugar cookie part comes out of a Betty Crocker mix and the jelly is now squeezable, they're just too much work for so little in return. The rolling part kills me. I can't get the wax paper to stay down, the roller absorbs everything, and it takes way too long to cut one tray's worth. Making cookies from a mix should be fun...

Before we started mixing anything, I decided I wanted to put some of the dough into the mini muffin tray and make my own sugar-cookie-and-jelly version of a Rese's peanut butter cup. They turned out well, though rolling was still involved. They're covered with the shapes cut out from the larger cookies.

LV will write a happier account of baking cookies that you can read here.

With two new sets of cookies, the corn muffins had to move...

Cookies, Muffins, Pasta Salad

On the Fourth of July, I felt like making nun's puffins again, but then thought I should make something to bring along to the BBQ later. Nun's puffs or muffins or biscuits didn't really feel appropriate. There were chocolate chips in the cabinet. The Tollhouse recipe seemed like more of a crowd-pleaser than the Better Homes & Gardens biscotti.

I forgot to take a picture... That's all that was left of my cookies after the fireworks. I'm still amazed.

Saturday morning I didn't feel like eating anything we had on hand for breakfast, so I made corn muffins. LV had long ago decided that corn muffins toasted with butter were the best breakfast, so we had two boxes of the super-cheap, super-easy Jiffy mix. I decided to make mini muffins to complicate the process.

After the muffins had cooled, they went into the container that the cookies had been in. This container had been filled to the top with cookies on the way to the BBQ.

Pizza has been the usual weekend dinner for a few too many weeks in a row. I thought we could do something healthier that didn't require the oven. Sure, the pasta still required a flame, but when all was said and done (and rinsed under lots of cold water), we had a good alternative to pizza in about the time it would have taken to prepare a pizza. Penne, peas, grape tomatoes (because we still have plenty of those around), cashews and crab (because the store didn't have frozen fully cooked shrimp) tossed with worcesterhire sauce, Italian seasoning and lots of olive oil.

Turkey Pizzas

LV had a dinner to go to, so I was on my own. I decided to try to use up the rest of the bread, topping it with BBQ sauce, turkey (Perdue Shortcuts Carved Turkey Breast is my new favorite thing), and mozzarrella cheese. Then I stuck it in the toaster oven for a really long time. And forgot to reset the timer back to normal. LV's PopTart was charred this morning. (But the little "pizzas" were really good!)

Leftovers

It's been a while since we made any Chef Boyardee at our house. A really long time in fact. When Luis asked me to combine the macaroni & cheese and meatballs in spaghetti sauce that were sitting in the fridge, that's all I could picture. He asked me if that was gross to combine the two. Um... Isn't that why The Chef is so popular with kids?

Cereal and Chicken

While it might sound like the makings of World Famous Chicken Crunch, I've been taking an ungodly number of pictures the past two weeks for a photo class. This is just LV pouring some cereal... I like the slow shutter speed on it.

This is Chicken Marsala in front of the TV. I don't like how the bounce flash makes food look so unappetizing, but I liked the effect it had here--some eery lighting to underscore the notion that I spent all that time preparing fresh mushrooms and pounding chicken to the right thickness only to plop down in front of the TV with it.

You can't really tell at this size, but there's a shallow depth of field b/c the flash isn't connected to the camera. The Sony bounce flash isn't compatible with the Canon Rebel, so I had to release the shutter and hit "test" at just the time without shaking the camera. Nice, huh? I bought a compatible Speedlite the next day.

Eww... Breakfast for Dinner

Hash browns always sound good to me. When I saw the recipe for hash browns (not home fries or the green pepper-potato-onion-mush some diners serve), I ran out and bought a bag of potatoes.

I've never peeled potatoes before. I patiently peeled all the potatoes after scrubbing them. Then patiently shredded far too many potatoes because I was being diligent to the recipe. Then I got tired; Breakfast for Dinner is supposed to be quick and happy. I decided the potato shreds did not need to be rinsed.

First the potatoes turned a rust color. Then they turned gray.

It looks like a photo of a giant sausage patty or something encrusted with pecans. There is sausage in the picture, but mainly you're looking at the hasbrowns. They were so gross. Much as LV told me they would be fine--there are dirty potato chips that aren't washed at all--he wasn't about to finish the leftovers. If I hadn't started drinking Heineken while peeling potatoes, I probably wouldn't have been able to eat more than a few forkfulls.

Fewer potatoes, more rinsing next time.

Heineken

I gave Heineken its own search label a long time ago because it plays such a key role in the menu at our house, but this would be Heineken's first solo entry: LV's going away party. It's kind of sad that Heineken is being overshadowed by Stella, the real LV choice of drink, in Heineken's first solo appearance.

(There are some takeout nachos in the background courtesy Wackjob, but food is never a key ingredient in getting people to participate in karaoke.)

Spicy Pecan Pork Sandwiches and the Return of Oatmeal Scotchies

The stack looks good, right? You can't tell from this angle how there isn't enough oatmeal in the cookies because you're busy wondering if the cup is really shaped that way or why there isn't more milk in the glass.



Scrappy refused to give the lettuce and tomato a try, but she ate pork breaded in toasted pecans, dijon mustard and cayenne pepper, so I figured that was enough of a win. Then again, it's fried breaded pork. How much convincing did she need to eat that?

LV was most excited about the amount of pork. The new level of preparation for fried food was something to rave about, but really he's just excited to have pork nuggets to snack on during tomorrow's games.

Pepper-Lime Chicken

The kitchen smelled so good when this started broiling. The combination of lime juice steaming and thyme... I've decided I really do need a grater because this is the third recipe calling for shredded citrus peel. I had to resort to using a peeler, and then chopping the peel.



I decided not to include the Heineken bottle in this shot even though it went with the green theme. The broiler on the oven would have put the chicken too close to the flame, so I used the toaster oven's broiler. This increased the cooking time immensely, leaving my empty stomach full of Heineken--not the best conditions for shooting Heineken labels clearly.

Game Day

I started out the football season with lots of chips and deli meat. Then I got a cookbook. I not only made buffalo wings, I also made the bleu cheese dip with real crumbled bleu cheese. The beer, however, I'll leave up to Heineken.