Spaghetti with Meat Sauce

It's spaghetti and half the ground beef I bought this weekend. I'm not thrilled. I was too distracted by a baby who refused to nap to season the meat properly.

Spaghetti and Meatballs

"Do you need me to bring anything home?"

"No, just yourself."

About ten minutes later, I realized I should have checked around before saying I didn't need anything. We were out of pasta sauce and meatballs were on the menu. Oops.

I had can of crushed tomatoes in the cabinet. No paste. Not a lot of vegetables to choose from. Just the can of tomatoes. So I decided I would figure out how to make that one can taste like a good sauce. Garlic, olive oil, a beef cube, and a lot of time simmering led to what I decided was an all right sauce. LV seems to be allergic to oregano, so I used basil. If anything, it looked good--a chunky sauce instead of the usual Prego over steamed asparagus.

Breaded Chicken

I was tired of grilled chicken. Adding any kind of breading gets to be a pain because there are two--sometimes three--bowls involved, but I was tired of grilled chicken. So this is my chicken dipped in a flour mixture.

Green Squash and Spaghetti

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.

Fresh Figs

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.

Spaghetti and Meatballs

Heat-and-serve meatballs with a jar of pasta sauce and frozen vegetables. Mmm...

Spaghetti and Meatballs

I always seem to focus more on the meatballs than the noodles when taking pictures of this. Mmm... Spaghetti.

Fun with Prepared Foods

I've had Oreos that were frosted on the wrong side, but I don't think I'd ever looked for the reversed stamp in the frosting before...

The options were meatballs or pork, and LV chose meatballs. I had to make the pork anyway so it didn't go bad. I just didn't take a picture of it yet. (Broiled, maple pepper, etc. You've seen it here before.)

Scones!

This recipe for cinnamon scones from an old issue of Food & Wine has been stuck to my refrigerator for months. I finally decided to make it this morning. It also gave me an excuse to finally get out the food processor.

I didn't read the directions carefully enough, so mine don't look like the three pictured in the issue, but they were pretty tasty for a first. (If a little bland and undercooked.)

This is leftover spaghetti from the night before. I thought it looked like an absurd amount of food, but was told that it is a small dish and "Don't treat me like a freak." The motion blur was approved, though. ;0)

Pork with Made Up Sauce

This is the pork. It looks okay. Mmm... Pork with some sort of breading.

This is the pork with a lemon-flavored pan sauce on top. Gross... It looks like the cat yacked on it.

But it did taste good.

Mushroom Sauce

I had pork and lots of mushrooms. So, I took the recipe for mushroom sauce and chicken in the Better Homes & Gardens cookbook and tweaked it. It was much more edible than it appears.

Chicken Strips

"You know what's really good that we haven't had in a while?"

"What?" I ask, while digging into the refrigerator.

"The tasty chicken," LV says. He then takes it back and says we have had the chicken strips on a regular basis, but he's made them and often forgotten some of the ingredients.

"Okay. I'll make that." I had the right kind of chicken in the meat drawer. They're fast. No problem. And just to make life easier on myself (and because I've broken half the shallow dishes LV used to have), I decided to bread everything in a mixing bowl. Fewer Ritz crackers spilled, more Ritz crackers on the chicken, still a pretty bland picture... But LV was happy.

Spaghetti (with new cookware)

We received a lovely 10-piece set of cookware in July that I didn't really put to use until September. So, even though this wasn't very difficult (store bought heat-and-serve meatballs), I had the pleasure of using matching and correctly sized pots. Yay.

Things That Didn't Merit Separate Entries

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.