Happy Thanksgiving!
Thanksgiving is like THE food holiday, and since we didn’t drive back home, we had our own Thanksgiving dinner here. It was my first time cooking a turkey, as well as the whole dinner. Everything was really good, except my Caramel Apple pie was invisibly ruined. First, the turkey:
Okay, it wasn’t really a fancy dinner party.. We had some friends over and made dinner for them. We decided to make Italian, and we don’t have too many Italian recipes so we could try something new. We came up with spinach-artichoke dip as the appetizer, fettuccine alfredo with grilled chicken, and roasted asparagus on the side. Hit “MORE” for the recipes…
Fresh & Easy is this small market that we’ve started shopping at. They have their own store brand and a lot of their products are “all natural”, or “no artificial preservatives/colors/trans fats”, or “organic” (if you’re into that). For us, its just good food at affordable prices. They have the best mint Oreo-style cookies ever!!!
My wife spotted their pre-made pizza dough, and made pizza and restaurant-style bread twists for dinner:
For my birthday, I got a set (2) of Skookies. What is a skookie? Its just a small cast iron skillet (like 6″ diameter) and you bake a cookie on it. While its still warm, you put icecream and other toppings on it. I love the “Never on Sundae” dessert from the Pizza Factory restaurant which is the same thing, and now I can make them at home!
One great thing about the Skookie is that you can use it for anything. My wife and I made personal pizzas on ours. Here’s the before and after shots:
I’ll have to expound on the virtues of cooking with cast iron another time, but everything cooks very well on a cast iron pan, and the pizzas came out perfect!
Just the other day, we had the usual “we’ve got nothing to eat” feeling when trying to figure out what to make for dinner. But this time, we really had nothing to eat! We needed to go to the store badly: in our freezer, we had hotdogs, bacon, and two chicken breasts. I suggested bacon-wrapped chicken, and my wife went looking for a recipe. She found a good one, and this was our dinner:
The recipe is from Allrecipes.com: Spinach stuffed chicken breast
You come home from work (or school), after a long day of breaking rocks, assembling widgets, or sitting through meetings… You’re hungry. Everyone’s hungry. There’s “nothing to eat.” Why not whip out some sloppy joes? They’re pretty quick, tasty, and they make a decent meal. The main ingredients are: ground beef, some tomato product, and some spices. They take less than 30 minutes, and you get a hot meal for not much work. Just make sure you have enough ketchup for the recipe, and for the future! Nothing’s worse than running out of ketchup.
“I made ‘em extra schloppy for ya!” (lunch lady from Billy Madison)
A few recipes below…
