Scrappy says, "Dinner is really good tonight."
While positive feedback is always a positive thing, she hadn't taken a bite. The crust was a whole wheat brand we'd never tried before and I used pasta sauce, which never quite tastes right on pizza. I thanked her and told her she really ought to try the food first so as not to seem sincere--especially if it turned out she hated it.
Luckily, she didn't hate it.
While I didn't really feel like making dinner, I also didn't want to serve a completely plain frozen pizza. So, I tossed on the leftover meat sauce and served it with green peppers.
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.
For about five years my birthday has fallen on Memorial Day weekend--the first big drinking Thursday of the summer, the first Summer Friday, the Saturday before Memorial Day,... Thanks to Leap Year, my birthday skipped over Memorial Day this year. However, thanks to LV, a giant bottle of TGI Friday's Pina Colada mix and the NBA playoffs, the phrase "It's your birthday weekend" still applied this year.
Frozen pizzas are boring, but cheap. And fast. So, seeing as this was Tuesday of just-another-week, we got Scrappy after school, at frozen pizza, played some SingStar, opened a present or two, and had some cake before her bedtime. It was kind of like my 11th birthday instead of my 28th. (Funny, I could only round up 11 candles to put on my cake...)
LV made breakfast (you can see his handiwork on his blog when it's updated), but I made dinner.
I've not only been slow to update this site, but also been on a bit of a break in the kitchen...
First we have a picture from LV to demonstrate that I really have been a good influence on Scrappy. When she went out to lunch at Outback, she ordered grilled chicken and green beans. Yeah, that's a kid's meal...
Then we have a picture from LV to demonstrate that he really could eat pizza every day. Even after saying he was not interested in eating and I covered the pizza in mushrooms (one of his least favorite vegetables), he still ate pizza.
I concluded that chicken pizza is not as filling as pork pizza because the same effort is not required to chew chicken.
Doesn't that sound tempting.
The other day I made all that pork to be sure it wouldn't go bad. Then I didn't know what to do with it. Neither of us really felt like eating a normal dinner that would take more than 20 minutes total to prepare, so, when I suggested to LV that we just put the pork on a frozen cheese pizza, he didn't object. "Filling" was the best word to describe dinner that night.
LV's quiet birthday consisted of Domino's Hawaiian thin crust pizza and a freshly baked homemade 99-cent cake. Mmm... If only I hadn't tried to frost the cake 20 minutes after it came out of the oven. (We were sort of crunched for time--Scrappy had to go to bed.)
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.
I started making pancakes when I was in junior high. Then I started making crepes. I have no idea now I used to make my crepes, but I was really good at it. Pancakes have never been a problem for me. Then I met my new stove.
The stove at my last apartment was only turned on once. The stove at LV's place was magical by comparison. I found a photo of it today when I was cleaning off the old computer's hard drive, and it clearly says "precision simmer" next to the burner switches. There's nothing precise about the new stove.
Until today, pancakes at the new place have all been burned on one side, under-cooked on the other. My pancakes do not fair well against the inability to control the flame and an eager six-year-old. Today, when she told me she could spell pbskids.org, I sent her to go play on the computer; the pancakes needed more time on this range than she was going to allow them.
Today's batch was more picture-ready than they have been since we moved here, but I felt like the outside was a little tough. That's not adjective I want to use to describe my breakfast...
For dinner, I forgot to defrost anything, so frozen pizza it was. But I hate just sticking a pizza in the oven without adding anything to it--a seasoning--anything. Today, by request, I added bacon bits. My only complaint is "Did I have to pick the least pretty corner to shoot?" But it's okay. Bacon makes everything better.
I couldn't believe it had been a week since my last post, so I decided to take a picture of my fridge to sort of show that I haven't been eating McDonald's and ordering pizza for a week.
1. CHICKEN QUESADILLAS The night before I made the Veal with Lemon-Capers sauce, I made chicken the way we used to at the old place: salt, pepper, olive oil. If we'd had some Project Runway to yell at and more Heineken, I would have thought it was 100 degrees outside. Three days later, the leftover chicken was marinated with chipotle sauce, chopped and thrown into the tortillas that are labeled in the photo. I assumed we had cheese when I decided to start making quesadillas. We had a lot of Kraft American singles...
2. SPAGHETTI & MEATBALLS It was pretty, but I didn't make the sauce or the meatballs. There's a recipe for homemade pasta in my cookbook, but I certainly didn't feel like doing anything but pouring from boxes, jars and containers that night.
3. CHICKEN DELICIOUS We ordered a roasted chicken (the tinfoil) from what LV thought would be the new Chirpin' Chicken. The chicken was really dry and nothing at all like Chirpin'. But the coleslaw and mashed potatoes were good. Compared to the really dry chicken.
4. PIZZA Tuesday we had Scrappy as per usual, so I suggested making one of the DiGiorno thin crust pizzas. Unlike LV's last oven, the new one has no clock, no timer, and doesn't beep when it's done preheating. Making a post out of his success with frozen pizza might have been rather condescending, though.
