Year 3 - Day 211 - July 29

My husband a newly-remembered love of flash fried eggplant, thanks to our crop share. This is eggplant-in-waiting. It's waiting for the sauce he made to be done. Well, it's what he calls spaghetti sauce, but I swear looks more like chili. (Mostly because it's 90% meat and 10% tomatoes, but I can totally get on board with that!) :)

Year 3 - Day 172 - June 20

I know what you are thinking. "Is that meat floating in water in an ice chest?"

Why yes, yes it is.

My brother is here for a couple days and did this with his friends. It sounded so hilarious that we had to try. And we just so happened to have a few steaks in the freezer. It's called Sous-Vide cooking. You put the meat in a vacuum sealed package (like the freezer vacuum things - or in our case, ziplock bags with the air out) and then put it in hot hot water for a certain amount of time. Then you finish them off on a super hot grill, just searing them quickly on both sides. They did come out amazingly good.

Here's a website that gives the basic gist of what we did.

http://www.seriouseats.com/2010/04/cook-your-meat-in-a-beer-cooler-the-worlds-best-sous-vide-hack.html

Year 3 - Day 115 - April 24

I like to call this portrait, how NOT to eloquently carve a chicken. It sure tasted good though! I love when roasters go on sale. We get 4 meals out of one. First we actually eat roast chicken. Then we have salad with chicken on top. For a quick meal, we toss some in the frying pan with BBQ sauce and have sandwiches. Then we have some with the "Microwave Pasta" recipe we got from Pampered Chef. (We usually shred it after eating the first night and then freeze it so that we don't have chicken 4 days in a row, though.)

Year 2 - Day 226 - August 15

When we started getting eggplant in our crop share a couple weeks ago, naturally my first thought was not a positive one. Mike on the other hand was thrilled. His grandmother used to make fried eggplant and he was the only one that would eat it with her. He found a recipe online for the last eggplant and liked it so much that he re-did it with this week's share. That's a lot of fried vegetables on that plate!

Year 2 - Day 210 - July 30

We finally used our oven today...to make cut up roasted potatoes (from our crop share) with our fancy garlic olive oil from CA.

Year 2 - Day 110 - April 21

You don't need to come home with a hundred bottles of mustard to play your own extreme couponing game.

Turkey Breast : $14.44
Steak #1: $3.06 (On sale)
Steak #2: $2.96 (On sale)
Texas Toast: $1.74 (On sale)
Cortaid: $4.99

Total On Sale Savings: $4.97
SubTotal: $27.19

Reward Points for Holiday Turkey: $14.44
Cellfire coupon: $2 off Cortaid
Texas Toast Coupon: $0.50
Doubled T.T. Coupon: $0.50
Cortaid Coupon: $2.00
Cellfire Reward Coupon: $5.00

Total Coupon & Reward Savings: $24.44

Total Out of Pocket Price: $2.75

This doesn't happen to me very often. Our grocery store (Shop Rite) runs specials around holidays where if you spend $300 in a 6 week time period you get a free ham or turkey.  So that make the turkey free.  (I wouldn't buy a frozen turkey breast anyway, so it's a real reward.)  Cortaid must be hurting for business because they have high value coupons on Cellfire & they spit out from the catalina machine at the store - and it lets you use both in one transaction.  This way, it's cheaper than the brandex hydrocortosone cream.  And finally, Cellfire had a random award day today where you could win anywhere between a $0.50 and $5.00 coupon.  I got lucky and got the big one - that's why I got the steaks as a treat. 

We used the Outback recipe from the Top Secret restaurant cookbook & they were pretty tasty.

Year 2 - Day 101 - April 12

Several weeks ago, we had nothing to watch on TV and came across "Throwdown."  In this particular episode, they were making fried green tomato sandwiches.  The details are fuzzy on who did what, but I remember one used thicker bread, one added bacon, they had different sauces/condiments, one added fresh tomatoes, and one fried his bread in bacon grease after making the bacon.

So tonight, when we made BLTs (minus the L, because it went bad, and minus the L on my side because why ruin a good bacon sandwich with vegetables) Mike decided to try the fry the bread in bacon grease trick.

His verdict: 2 thumbs up.  I didn't try it, it was just too much.  But after cooking an entire package of bacon and then his 4 slices of bread, there were only 2 tablespoons of grease left in the pan.  I think it's usually MUCH more than that.  (He didn't eat all 4, thank goodness!)

Year 2 - Day 25 - January 25

I really don't feel like tonight's dinner is all that adventerous - Sausage w/ peppers & onions, pasta & sauce - but it all of a sudden was taking up all 4 burners.

After we get a new hot water heater, a new stove is on the list.  It was hard to cook on all 4 burners because 3 of them are tiny. 

Day 326 - November 22

Behold - the organized and ready to go "December baking cabinet!"  Let's eat some sugar! :)

Day 280 - October 7

I love this book.  I don't really bake much, and even if I did I doubt I could pull many of these off - but this sequel to Hello Cupcake has some adorable designs.  My favorite is the chinese food take out.  They cut up orange starburst to be the little carrots, and they used a cut green Tootsie Roll, some icing, and some sprinkles to create broccoli.  Genius!

Day 254 - September 11

In preparation for the Ravens game tomorrow and friends coming over to hang out, Mike spent the day making chili.  It's like 20 ingredients!  The bowl is full of the random veggies that had to be diced, and in addition there is a pan with 2 pounds of ground beef and a pound of sausage that didn't make the picture.

My prediction is that I will eat 3 bites...Why can't chili just be meat marinating in the sauce? Why must this vegetable group infringe on a perfectly good meal? :)

Day 247 - September 4

We have two parties to go to this weekend, so we made our pretzel-chocolate-M&M snacks in mass quantities.  This is the peanut M&M cookie sheet, and we also did a sheet of plain.

Day 130 - May 10

This is what I see when I try to watch cookies bake.  Our oven doesn't have a window. :)

Day 19 - January 19th

I really hate the way onions taste.  However, the smell of them cooking and caramalizing is one of my favorite cooking smells.  Don't ask, I don't know why. :)