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).
LV tells me all the eggs are going to expired. "All the eggs" being a full dozen we hadn't used. What could I make with a dozen eggs... I could more than double the recipe I have for crème brulée and scramble all the egg whites? That's A LOT of scrambled eggs. I figured if the crème brulée shelf life was eight hours, then I could eat the scrambled eggs for breakfast. (I put it on a sandwich. It was... different. And maybe too many onions for the morning.)
I liked the sausage and peppers when we had it on sandwiches, but in order to make that I actually have to remember to go to the store and get the hero rolls. I didn't plan ahead. We sausage and peppers over rice. It was fine.
Personally, I can't believe I made dinner today. I'll attribute its super-boring contents to needing to offset my super-exciting day. And that it's all we had in the fridge: chicken, tortillas, and ears of corn.
With all the takeout and meat-centric meals lately, I made salad. It looks like normal salad, but really it's Yum Salad buried under all the cucumbers that were on sale. Yum.
