The grocery store wasn't selling ground beef in anything less than 4 lb. packages. Seriously. What am I gonna do with four pounds of ground beef? I made four little hamburgers for LV and me, and then froze the rest. Unfortunately, I didn't think until after it was over to separate all the leftover meat into smaller sections. I froze it as one big block. The burgers, however, we delicious.
Here we are again... more steak. I thought it would be boring to name this "steak" again. Curly parley is so much more exciting, right?
Our grocery store had wings, so I made them for the 1 'o-clock game. They were good. Routines are good. :0)
Continuing to feel up to the challenge of more difficult dishes, I made crab cakes. When I called my mom that night and she asked what I had for dinner, I told her crab cakes. She didn't really picture me rolling them out by hand. After I explained, she said, "I'm so proud of you."
We had made a few trips to IKEA, so it wasn't that LV needed a Swedish meatball fix. I hadn't made them in what felt like forever and was up to the challenge. It was probably easier this time than the last time I made them.
You can see I had a lot of tomato and onion to pile on top of the broil. There wasn't time for it to bake in the oven for several hours. I think I gave it maybe two hours at a higher temperature. But then then I popped it in the broiler to give it the crispier exterior that LV likes. It was good.
LV didn't believe me every time I make chicken, there is one obligatory leftover piece. It's the leftover leftover--after I've eaten some of what's left and don't feel like eating it for the third time. This is leftover breaded chicken with baby spinach.
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.
I really don't like the guys on Fox who announce the Bears games. I think they're really annoying because they seem to hate the Bears. My wings kind of helped ease the pain of having to listen to them. ("Having" because WGN can't broadcast over the internet and I don't have my stereo hooked up to be able to listen to Sirius while I watch the game. One day I will figure that out...)
After spending the day at a Chuck E. Cheese birthday party, I was, again, feeling like we should eat more vegetables. I had bought frozen carrots the week before because we hadn't had them in a while. No one was all that excited to see their return.
LV and I had hit Target the night before and bought a bag of candy bars. In general, nothing we'd been eating all week was very healthy, so, when I went to the grocery store to look for something to make for dinner, I decided to buy a bunch of vegetables for salad. While we heard one trick-or-treater complain several times that he needed real food, we were okay and out for much longer than our first year in this neighborhood.
This week the grocery store had wings, so I made my fake teriyaki flavor. They were saucy.
For dinner, we had steak. You can't tell from the picture how much hemming and hawing went into this meal. I didn't feel like ordering out again, but I also didn't feel like making dinner. There were too many dishes already stacked up, but we couldn't eat just steak. We ended up just creating a lot of dirty dishes and having a nice dinner.
Scrappy wanted to help with cubing mangoes. Her way of helping is to eat every other slice and tell me how our cooking show is going. It was far more entertaining than cooking by myself and much more tame than the witches and uncontrollable dancing spells that were involved in baking cookies.
Although she helped make the rice, Scrappy was not involved in grilling the pork. I think she was also surprised by the addition of ginger and cinnamon to the mangoes she'd cut.
Scrappy had been asking about cookies for weeks. Cookies hadn't been high on my list of "fun things to do" for a quite a while, but I decided to go ahead and bake Halloween cookies. This time I prepared the Pillsbury sugar cookie recipe and let it sit in the refrigerator for three hours. That worked out much better than the mix we'd used before.
Scrappy decorated the cookies with powdered sugar frosting topped with more powdered sugar frosting covered in fistfuls of colored sugar crystals. Sweet and crunchy would be good ways to describe the results. I left a tray undecorated. Mmm...
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.
I didn't grow up on Hamburger Helper, so whenever I hear the name I picture burgers like ketchup and mustard and french fries kind of "hamburger." I had a sirloin burger leftover in one container and pasta leftover in another. I decided to combine them for lunch. With some ketchup and relish. Why not...
I really wanted to make chocolate chip cookies. The night before a shoot probably isn't the time be making cookies, but it's what I really wanted to do. Plus we didn't have any Oreos left.
The first football season we watched from home, LV and I ate a lot of sandwiches and chips. The second season, we ate wings every Sunday and there wasn't much of a spread. Last season, I worked every Sunday. This season, we can't really count on wings being available at the grocery store. So, I've had to get more creative.
I didn't want to do sandwiches again this week, so I bought a couple pounds of ground beef and made sliders for every game. Without dinner rolls as buns, this idea might not have worked. Not that it was really the idea I'd imagined. I was thinking of turning each burger into a different flavor--salsa, BBQ, etc.--but I only ate two and LV only put ketchup on his. He said that when the burger is good, it doesn't need anything else.
Once upon a time, our grocery store had Hormel pork tenderloin. It was the greatest thing ever. Then they never ordered it again. (The same way they seem to have only ever had one shipment of good frozen pizzas or refuse to sell anymore chicken wings this football season.)
This week they had all kinds of prepared meats. None of them were pork tenderloin, but this particular roll didn't seem to have as much cheese as the beef pinwheels (shh... I told LV there was *no* cheese in this), so we bought... whatever this called. It's an Italian pork. I baked it for 40 minutes and served it with pasta. I was afraid it would be super dry and plain without a sauce, but it was actually good.
The grocery store had ready-to-grill sirloin beef patties that looked really good. So I bought the package with no real idea how or when I would use them. By the end of the week, it was obvious we needed to use up the rest of the bread. Hence, patty melts. I think the half Scrappers had might have been a bit too much for her. That or all the BBQ chips.
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.
LV, who usually doesn't notice that I didn't bother to trim off the fat, said, "This is really fatty, huh?" I don't think that even begins to describe those cuts...
None of the salad at the store looked good, so I bought a bag of ready-to-serve "more creative" salad. "More creative" because it includes toasted almonds and dried cranberries and some vinaigrette. (LV has forgotten more things than most people will ever know, but he dug out the correct spelling of vinaigrette. That one "stood" in his brain.) I added the strawberries and turkey. Done.
I almost forgot! I made corn muffins to go with this. That made it see more filling.
These are sausages and peppers... There's not much to say, except that this time I actually made it all in a pan instead on the grill. The main difference there was that I got bored quickly and tried to serve the sausage while it was still uncooked. Kind of gross...
We bought two pounds of wings, so, for the Monday night game, we had more wings. I felt they should be part of a meal of junk food, hence nachos. (Note there is still portfolio work in the background...)
This is the grease left behind by the plate of wings that LV has deemed the greatest wings ever made. I'm noticing a pattern: When I don't take a picture, it's the greatest thing LV's ever eaten.
I didn't want to eat KFC, so we bought the box of frozen fried chicken and can of biscuits. Then I mixed a leftover red onion half with green squash and a tomato. The biscuits were probably the best part.
The minimal effort continued as I grilled steak with egg noodles. Vegetables? Who needs them. They take time.
The only thing easier than Hamburger Helper is a frozen meal. I'm in the middle of retouching for my portfolio and LV's in the middle of making changes for freelance clients, so we went to the grocery store, picked up a Bertolli bag of frozen sausage and peppers (I think) and dumped it on the stove. Again, I forgot all about it and let it burn to the bottom of the skillet. Oops... But, again, the burn wasn't all that noticeable.
The best thing about Hamburger Helper is not that it's an easy thing to make when I'm too tired after a weekend of traveling and shooting, but that I can completely forget it's on the stove and it's still edible. This is the bacon cheeseburger flavor that burned to the bottom of the skillet.
LV says, "It was very tasty. I ate a lot of it."
After a long day of sampling events and mall fashion shows, the very kind people of Alcone Marketing and LG mobile took me with them to dinner at the very cheesy Rainforest Cafe. While the client was checking the LSU score, we "remembered" it was his birthday.
This is spring mix with turkey, tomatoes, red onions, walnuts, and maybe some other stuff I bought and at the last minute remembered I needed to turn into a salad. (It hasn't been a good couple weeks for produce in our kitchen. I keep forgetting to use it...)
Heat-and-serve meatballs with a jar of pasta sauce and frozen vegetables. Mmm...
At the grocery store, Scrappy asked what snow peas were. She said she would eat them. Bing. Snow peas went into the basket along with flank steak and red peppers. Unfortunately, a bag of rice didn't make it in there, so all I had was yellow rice. I guess that's not unfortunate. Yellow rice is good. And Scrappy did eat it all.
I missed last year's football season because I worked Sunday brunch. This year, our grocery store didn't have wings the first weekend. But this week--this week--we had wings. First we had teriyaki wings (because I discovered we had two full bottles of soy sauce) and then the usual buffalo wings.
Feeling like we hadn't had any vegetables in a while, I made green beans and tomatoes to go with the vermicelli and grilled pork, but it turned out to be kind of pretty. I'm not sure if the pork was as tasty as the grilled pork I made last week but didn't take a picture of. LV claims it was the best pork ever. And there's no proof that it existed.
I had a lot of vegetables and no real inclination to make rice or pasta. So, we had a big steak with tomatoes and red peppers. Kind of monochromatic, but tasty.
We had a lot of pasta sauce leftover from the night before, so I made a box of pasta, ate a little for lunch with the leftover sauce, and used the rest for a pasta salad. I forgot to take a picture of the salad before I wrapped it up, though.
Luis really wanted pasteles. This was his request for dinner. Sure. After two years of seeing the Goya frozen pasteles at the grocery store and saying, "No, no. Let's not get them," he requests them after they've disappeared from the store.
No more heat-and-serve pasteles, but they and prepared frozen discos. I thought that I was making pasteles off the recipe in the back. Did I mention I was completely cracked out from a stressful day? I ended up with really nasty empanadas. Doughy shells, corned beef stuffing... They were gross. But there were 10 of them for the two of us. So, I ate empanadas for lunch the next day. And the day after that. The taste did not improve.
There was this episode of Family Matters where Laura decides she can make breakfast in half the time if she just cooks everything at twice the temperature. Then Urkle has to rush over and put out the blaze she's started in the kitchen. I didn't set the kitchen on fire, but the episode came to mind when I decided to just guess that increasing the temperature would be a good way to get the London broil cooked in half the time.
If you've followed the posts here, you've seen the charred thing that comes out of the oven after 6 (or more) hours at 225 degrees. At 4 'o-clock, I put this in the oven at 325 degrees, hoping it would be ready by 7:30 (or whenever LV got home). LV always proclaims that charred lump tastes good, but this time it really did. Maybe it was the smaller baking dish. Maybe it was the decrease in time. Maybe it was a thicker, fattier cut. Whatever it was. It as soooo much better this time.
I changed the header on this blog to say that I serve dinner with no complaints: I don't complain, my family doesn't complain. Two days later, I get complaints.
"Daddy... I don't want to eat the raspberries."
Scrappy was waiting for her instant corn cake to rise in the oven. We hadn't even sat down to eat. And she was already protesting... the raspberries?
The salad had started to turn. I was meticulously picking out good pieces from bad pieces in the spring mix, and she's protesting... raspberries.
This had to be because I changed the header.
I didn't know what to server with the hamburgers I made, so I chopped up the cherry tomatoes and added blueberries. That went over well enough. We had plenty of popcorn and Twizzlers at the movies that afternoon, so there wasn't much need for anything extra with dinner.
I didn't feel like having the normal grilled chicken. (read: plain) So I mixed up brown sugar, soy sauce and lemon juice. It didn't have any time to marinate, but it still seemed to soak in just fine while grilling. Maybe because I kept adding more every minute...
Why keep making the same salad by myself? This time LV and Scrappy pitched in, cutting strawberries and tomatoes (a new addition).
