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.

Yolanda's Tomatoes

Our downstairs neighbor grows the best tomatoes and then gives them to us. I decided to try slow cooking a London broil again. This time I didn't leave it in the oven over night. Hence, the tomatoes are still red.

Labor Day

After eating leftover hot dogs and wings for lunch at my parents, we hit the Dairy Queen on our way out of town. Mmmm... Waffle turtle sundae.

Illinois Reception

This little guy was hanging out, waiting for the party.

And it looks like this little lady was also just hanging out, waiting for the party. But she came in and helped me slice up tons of things. (If only we hadn't doubled and tripled the recipes...)

Good Housekeeping had a really enticing article on picnic foods. The recipes were meant to serve 8. Doubling the recipe looks like it's meant to serve 8 families. There were two platters like this...

This is the tarragon vinaigrette. I think I tried it. It sounded good. And I had to look all over for fresh tarragon leaves. We had some traditional onion dip, too. Or maybe it was ranch.

I was definitely too busy arranging shrimp skewers and trying to finish the 216 wings to sit down and eat a giant bowl of carrots. I should have placed a dollar bill next to the bowl for scale...

This wasn't what my mom wanted. Trays of shrimp with cocktail sauce in the middle were on sale. I said they looked sketchy and bought a bag of frozen shrimp instead.

You'll notice the lack of pictures of wings. I made them in buffalo, plain, chipotle and extra spicy varieties. I think only three of the nine packages actually went into the broiler. I had a lot of sangria.

I had cake, too. Although the invitations my mom sent out misspelled LV's name, the cake was correct. And tasty.

Labor Day Prep

There were lots and lots of things to slice while I was in my mother's kitchen by myself. These were for the sangria that needed to sit a day.

My mother decided the best menu would be enough chicken wings to feed an army and bratwurst. I see that as an appetizer and a side item... Prepping wings usually calls for a 2-cup Pyrex measuring cup, but there was not one available. So, I used this coffee mug. I can picture that coffee mug in every kitchen my family's lived in.

This is how packed the fridge was the day before the Illinois reception. I don't think the fridge was this packed with food when my mom threw a surprise 40th birthday party for my dad. (The last good party she hosted far too many years ago.)

1. Hot dogs The bratwurst she wanted to buy from Butera looked disgusting, so she opted for too many packs of hot dogs. Her original plan was to make macaroni & cheese for all the kids. At a BBQ? Kids eat hot dogs. (And Scrappy wasn't a fan of mac & cheese yet.)

2. Encore Cases and cases of cheap soda were crammed into the fridge. Cheap soda, fine. But to take up all that real estate for something that could be chilled in the cooler the next day? The entire shelf was filled with cans.

3. Tobasco Most of one large bottle goes into a batch of wings. I'm surprised there aren't more bottles of Tobasco in this picture. I ended up buying two or three more after this photo was taken.

4. Wings We bought 9 packages of a dozen wings that morning. After my mom emphatically told me about how much more experience she has with party planning than I do and that there were 30!! people coming, I turned the volume off on the little voice in my head that kept saying, "This is ridiculous." So, after visiting every grocery store in town to see who had the best deal, we were panicking that there weren't "enough" packages left at the first store by the time we came back to it. Four packages wouldn't do. We needed nine. Nine package of 12 wings that would be cut into two smaller wings each for 30 people my mom hasn't attempted to feed since my dad turned 40... Somewhere on mute, the little voice was saying, "This is ridiculous." And that was before I attempted to use an old coffee mug and a dull knife to turn frozen packages of wings (because five had to come from the freezer) into something delectable.

5. Carrots You can't see the six pounds (seriously) of potato salad hidden in the fridge, so I'll just point to the ridiculous amount of carrots.

6. Lemonade My mom really wanted lemonade. I don't know anyone who drinks it besides her. It was on sale buy-one-get-one-free, so there are two in the fridge.

7. Taco Dip Blue Goose apparently makes a mean taco dip. I don't know if I had any... It was yet another grocery store in town to hit that.

8. Berries I bought a few too many raspberries and strawberries for the sangria. Some of the strawberries went into a Jell-o salad. But that's a lot of berries.

Pizza-ish

We were tired, so we bought pre-cooked chicken at the grocery store. Then I set the toaster oven to 450 degrees and made these tortilla/BBQ sauce/cheddar/mozzarella/chicken concoctions. They toasted much faster than making quesadillas...

Breakfast

I made the eggs, LV handled the turkey ham and toast. It was good.

Steak

This is steak. It doesn't really look like it. I bought a big long strip again, so this is the middle portion. I broiled it one night when I wasn't sure what we would eat, then stuck it in the refrigerator for two days. When we were ready for a steak night, I warmed it up in the oven at a low temperature for like an hour. Hence, it's a well-done steak.

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...

Leftover Salad, the sequel

So, I thought making another pasta salad with crab would be good. We had a lot of I-don't-know-when-anyone's-going-to-actually-eat-this items in our refrigerator that got tossed in. A red apple, half an onion, the last of the frozen peas, peanuts... It all actually tasted good together.

I find it really odd that apples never brown when I put them into a recipe...

(Gross-looking) Quesadilla

We had a big block of turkey ham, so I thought it would be good to put into a quesadilla as a quick dinner. It was so soggy. The turkey ham isn't really to blame; more my lack of patience at the stove.

Breakfast

These are really old frozen waffles with turkey ham and play food. Scrappy had already eaten, but she wanted to serve us. She really wanted to serve the kittens, but they just weren't into plastic food.

Domino's

This is the first night we had kittens. No one felt like cooking, so we ordered Domino's. It hit the spot.

Ugly Pork

I don't like this picture... This is pork with a lot of butter and maple pepper seasoning on the top. I think taking the magenta out of the picture to make the pork look more "done" has made it look more dead. Oh, well. It tasted fine.

Yellow Rice, Chicken & Green Beans

There were no Goya products in Sanibel, so we bought some other brand of instant yellow rice in a little bag with a Flamenco dancer on the front. But we also bought a box of Spanish rice made by Uncle Ben or someone less Hispanic. (JetBlue had us waiting in the terminal for too long.) Needless to say, we brought a bag of yellow rice home with us.

After yelling at the computer for freezing in the middle of printing my wedding pictures, I didn't feel like making dinner. But, LV had made a big breakfast this morning (he forgot to take a picture), so... the least I could do was create some more dishes for him to wash.

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...

Dairy Queen

This is the first Blizzard LV ever ate. Much like Sonic and Walmart, Dairy Queen is one of those things advertised constantly on New York television yet not readily accessible to New Yorkers. So, we hit the Sonic (where LV learned that all the commercials take place in the car because you eat in the car) and Walmart Supercenter (to get Scrappy one of the High School Musical T-shirts constantly advertised on TV) and the DQ.

Branching out from his usual Cookie Dough ice cream, LV went for the Caramel Waffle something or other Blizzard. It was so good we went back the next night.

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.

Ketchup and Pickles

Crazy kids that we are, we had after party at the Marriott's bar. I, of course, did not make this Angus burger. I was just fascinated by the way it appears LV decided to wipe ketchup all over the pickle--as though it might be more edible that way.

LV had no idea that a) there was ketchup all over his pickle or b) his burger was that rare.

There should be more pictures here from Sunday--the next morning--but I didn't take any pictures of the brunch we made. I didn't even think about pictures. I was more concerned with trying to keep pace with my Aunt Monika who can prepare food and wash dishes faster than anyone I've ever witnessed.