Exceedingly Mundane

One of my favorite places to go is food type stores. I love regular grocery stores, gourmet grocery stores, warehouse clubs (because Hello, I am a “gatherer” to the nth degree, so buying food in large quantities makes me unreasonably happy). I love browsing in local kitchen stores (we have two nice ones here, Choppin Block and Everyday Gourmet), chain stores like Williams-Sonoma, etc. You get the picture.

So, it goes without saying that when we go on vacation, and we’re near one of my all-time favorite stores, Harry and David, I always, always, always make Tim stop. It used to be that I’d have him take me to scrapbook stores, but those days are mostly in the past. These days I’m all about food. We stopped at one on our weekend getaway a week ago, and I was actually really good. I could have easily bought a ton more stuff, but I try to keep it reasonable. Their stuff is expensive, but it is so good. I’ve never had anything from Harry and David that I didn’t love.

Here’s the link to what I bought last year on vacation, and it’s fairly similar. Instead of the grilling sauces this time, I picked up a couple of premade dips – mozzarella dip and spinach/artichoke. Football season is upon us and I was thinking game day food 😀

Here’s what we got this time around:

Yummy, yummy in my tummy. Two bags of Moose Munch, two kinds of salsa (Habanera for Tim and Very Cherry for me), spinach & artichoke dip, mozzarella dip and triple berry blend jam. I was really good, wasn’t I?!

A couple of weekends ago, I made a new cake recipe! I love to bake, but don’t do it much in the summertime. The whole, run the oven at a high temperature for nearly an hour and heat up the kitchen thing 😀

I saw this recipe for a Butterfinger Cake posted over at Stephanie’s blog, Punkin Press, and decided to try it. Good stuff!

This cake is similar to others I have made. I love doing this kind of cake in the summer, they always seem light and refreshing. For a lemon flavor, I often make my mom’s Lemonade Cake (in a bundt pan). I’ve also made this Strawberry Daiquiri Cake which is really good. I seem to make the Honeybun Cake more in the fall or winter, but it’s good too. All of these have the same thing in common – when the cake comes out of the oven warm, you poke holes in it and pour a glaze or topping over it. A couple of them are topped off with Cool Whip or a type of icing.

Enjoy!

I blogged recently about what topics you’d like to see some posts about, and several of you said that you’d like to see some new recipes. I glean recipes from other blogs and cooking sites. So, some of you lurking or visiting here might see your own recipes or some you’ve seen at other blogs. I don’t claim any of them to be original, just recipes I’ve found online that sounded good, we tried and liked! I do try to give credit where credit is due 🙂 Anyway, I’m trying to use my crockpot and stovetop more in the summers. I really hate turning on the oven when it’s so hot, and so I either use my toaster oven or try to cook things on the stovetop. I’ve tried a couple of new skillet dishes lately that we’ve liked. They are not fancy or gourmet by any means, just good old fashioned comfort food!

The first one I tried came from Shawna, who said it was originally a Pampered Chef recipe. It’s for Skillet Lasagna. I don’t have a photo of the lasagna, but it was good. I’ll definitely make it again. It makes a lot for the two of us though. We had leftovers for lunch several days afterwards!

The next one came from Amy, and is a homemade version of Cheeseburger Macaroni. Tim loves Hamburger Helper cheeseburger macaroni, but I try to stay away from too much processed stuff. They’re great time savers, but I have a lot of time to cook and most of the time, I enjoy it. I do take shortcuts though, like everyone else. I do a lot of stuff from the freezer, like frozen eggrolls and never make my own!

Anyway, here’s the Cheeseburger Macaroni:

The second time I made it, I tried to make it even healthier and instead of using the canned soups, I made my own. For the beef broth, I used the Better Than Bouillon paste and made broth that way. Instead of using a can of Campbell’s Cheddar Cheese soup, I found a substitute online and tried that. I think it was probably healthier, but it did mess up a lot more dishes. I’m not sure either of us could tell a difference, so that was good. I just had a lot more pots and pans to wash after making the soup and broth!

Lastly, for good measure, I’ll repost a couple of links of other skillet dishes I’ve made lately. These are not new to me, many of them I’ve been making several years. But they are tried and true in our house and something I make periodically. The first is for Sloppy Joe’s – I don’t like Manwich and I never have. So, I’ve been making this recipe for years. I usually use ground turkey these days, and I just sort of wing the sauce. I’ve found that one 8 oz can of tomato sauce is not enough for us with two pounds of meat. I usually use one 8 oz can for 1 pound of meat, because we like our joe’s very sloppy!

Another winner around here is my skillet Hamburger Stroganoff. I’ve also been making this many years and we like it. I think it’s the sour cream!

Hope you find something that you want to try. Again, these are nothing special, just easy dishes to do in a big skillet on the stovetop. We’re big on comfort food around here, there’s no gourmet chefs or eaters in this house!

Have a great day!

We went to eat at Chili’s over the long holiday weekend. They had a new menu and I was rather dismayed that they took my favorite salad off the menu, but that they also got rid of the lettuce wraps! I really loved getting those there and did often. At least they left the molten lava cakes on the dessert menu! They had the regular chocolate one and then a new white chocolate one. We stuck to the tried and true though!

My all-time favorite thing to get at Chili’s hasn’t been available on their menu in at least five years. For years, I loved getting the tuna sandwich – a grilled fillet of tuna on a whole wheat bun with the best sauce on it. I can’t even remember now what the sauce/aioli/mayo was, but it was delicious. I moaned for years that they took it off the menu 🙁

Don’t cha just hate it when you get used to ordering a favorite dish at a restaurant and then they take it off the menu? Has that happened to you? That’s today’s Question of the Day – leave me a comment and let me know what you miss!

If you’ve visited here before, you’ve probably seen me mention the fact that I don’t really remember anything from my childhood. That gap in my memory stretches right on through most of high school and college. Weird, huh?

I’d like to think, however, that when I was little, I liked peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I know I like them now. I’ve been on a kick for over a month now, of regularly having PB&J sandwiches for lunch. That’s because I discovered this at our new Fresh Market:

They grind peanuts fresh in the store and it tastes so good! I keep it in the fridge and pull it out regularly, along with blackberry (preferred) or raspberry preserves and make myself a pb&j for lunch.

How about you… is there any food that reminds you of your childhood? I remember loving my grandmother’s chicken and rice (sort of like chicken and dumplings). I’ve tried many times as an adult to recreate it, but I never come close.

Have a great day!

We had some homemade nachos over the long holiday weekend. They’re probably not as good as the ones we get in sports bars and restaurants, but we certainly liked them well enough. This was supper one night, and between the two of us, we polished off the whole darn thing 😀 I know, I know, there’s not a redeeming thing about these. Loaded with fat and calories; they’re probably more of a “heart attack on a platter”. But, I will say that I used ground turkey for the meat, LOL!

Yes, they were finger-licking-good!

I’m hoping to post more food-related posts soon. I’ve actually made a couple of new recipes in the last month or so that were good, and that I’ll make again. I always go grab my camera and make Tim wait to eat until I can snap some “blog-worthy” photos. Yes, I’m a nerd!

Also, I’m on the lookout for some more new skillet dishes. We’re cranking up into summer here, and I just almost refuse to run my oven. Granted, I only had to turn it on for 10-12 minutes for the nachos, but still, it heated up the kitchen pretty well. When it gets to be summertime, I turn to my cookbooks and online cooking blogs for recipes to make in the crockpot and on the stovetop. I’ve got a couple of new skillet entrees I want to try, but am always on the lookout for more. If you’ve got one you make and like, please let me know!

Have a great day and eat something yummy today!

I love flavored creamers. I can’t drink coffee without a lot of help, and my favorite thing to add is a flavored creamer. Here’s two of my latest favorites:

I think my fave of these two is the Black Cherry one. I love anything and everything cherry flavored. Ok, off to get my one cup of coffee that I allow myself every day. Thank goodness, we have really big cups!

I haven’t felt great this week. Nothing really hurts and I don’t have a fever or infection, but I just generally don’t feel good. The blah’s mostly. I don’t seem to have a lot of energy and I do NOT want to get anywhere near the treadmill. That treadmill is evil (more on that later).

So when you have a sweet husband like mine, one who offers to go get me Chinese one night for supper, you take him up on it (that way, I don’t have to cook!) He knows Chinese food is my favorite. 😀

He also came in with this:

It’s from Snow Biz and it’s a strawberry shortcake snow cone. Yummy! He said he thought it would make me feel better! And he was right, it really did!

Tim and I stopped after church last weekend at our new Fresh Market grocery store. I’ve been several times, and have been wanting to get some stuff from their meat and seafood counters to take home and prepare at home. They have some awesome looking food – fish that is coated in sesame or almond mixtures, seafood stuffed with crabmeat and other fillings, chicken breasts that are stuffed or seasoned, beef pinwheels, stuffed flank steaks, huge burgers that are stuffed with things like blue cheese, portabello mushrooms, etc, stuffed pork chops and even italian meatloaves already prepared and ready to bake. Every thing I have seen looks awesome 🙂

So, after church, we stopped by and got some cranberry-brie stuffed chicken breasts. I had sweet potatoes and salad mix at home already, so I was happy with just those. Tim was really sweet though, and knew I wanted to try more stuff there. So, we got some spinach-artichoke dip from the deli counter (delicious, as good as any we’ve had in a restaurant) and some of their bottled lemonade. I swear, the lemonade might also have been the best stuff I’ve tasted. I know I’ve had raspberry lemonade at Olive Garden or somewhere like that and it is really good, but this stuff is just as good, or better 🙂

I didn’t take pictures of the food, but I might next time! The chicken breasts were supposed to be cooked in the oven for about 50 minutes, but Tim was starving and didn’t want to wait that long, so we threw them on the grill. I don’t think they cooked as well, so next time, I want to follow the instructions. They still tasted good, but probably not as good as they would have if they had been baked in the oven.

The lemonade was so good, it tasted just like spring! It was perfect for eating lunch outside in the sunshine, on our deck. They had several flavors of this lemonade, but Tim wanted to start off “easy”. 🙂 He doesn’t tend to like really fruity stuff. I would have tried the blueberry or pomegranate or other flavors, but we started off slow with just the pink lemonade:

I’m hoping to make this a new tradition for the spring. I’ve told Tim that I want to stop over there after church for the next few weeks, and get something new to try every time. We’ll see how well that goes over, and for how long. 😀

I’ve been trying, for a while now, to figure out how to post this question, without either appearing like a weirdo and without making my blogger buddies out there run screaming from the computer because it’s such an odd and long-winded question. I haven’t quite figured out how to do either of those yet, so I guess I’ll just dive right in.

I’m curious about how much “stuff” others have in their kitchen cabinets, drawers and pantry. Do other people have as much cookware, bakeware, prep equipment, gadgets, etc as I do? Tim says most people don’t. This question comes about for two basic reasons – 1) I’m wanting to get more dishes (I’ve almost completely decided on Fiestaware, but waffling on color choices) but also keep the everyday dishes I already have (Mikasa French Countryside). Which means some “stuff” has to go to make room for more dishes and mugs. And 2) I’m trying to declutter and clean different areas of the house, and the kitchen is a hard one for me. I really and truly feel like everything in my kitchen is either needed (something I use on a fairly regular basis while cooking and baking), or else, if it’s something I rarely use, it’s stored there because it is kitchen-related and I have no where else to store it for part of the year. Think seasonal stuff, like a roasting pan for cooking a turkey or ham at the holidays.

I do have a lot of stuff. I like to cook and bake. I’m wondering if other people who cook have as much, or more, or less. For example, I have more than one muffin pan. I have a 12 cup muffin tin, a 6 cup muffin tin and a mini-muffin tin. Tim says I should just have one, but I say, sometimes I make a recipe for 12, sometimes I cut muffins or cornbread in half and just cook 6 in my toaster oven, and sometimes I make mini muffins. Those are just for muffins – if I’m baking a cake, I like to have a choice of a round cake pan, an oblong pan (like a 9×13) or a bundt pan. Which leads to another example – I have more than one 9×13 pan. I have metal, because I like metal for bar cookies, brownies, cakes and things like that. I also have a glass one, because I like to make casseroles and stuff like that in a glass or ceramic one. I have mixing bowls, a Dutch oven, a bigger soup pot, various and sundry casserole dishes (I have about 5 different sizes in the Corningware French White, it matches my everyday white dishes and I like Corningware products). I do bake bread, so I have more than one loaf pan, too. The madness never ends, it just keeps going on and on 🙂

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I’ve been on a mini baking spree lately. Not as much as I used to bake, years ago… but then again, we’re trying to watch what we eat and not go overboard. I used to bake a lot more than I do now. When Tim worked full-time in the office, I baked fairly often. We could have a taste or two, and then he could take the rest in to the office. He used to tell me, “they love to see me coming in with that Tupperware container under my arm”. That always made me really happy! 🙂

I made a loaf of banana bread a couple of weeks ago, then last weekend, I made some Buttermilk Whole Wheat Bread. I use my bread machine for the dough, then take it out, knead and shape, then let it rise again in the loaf pan. We like bread better that way (I think Tim loves to smell it baking in the oven, and you don’t get as much of that with the machine doing the whole thing).

I’ve also made this bar cookie two or three times in the past couple of weeks, and we really like them. I “found” that I had a couple of bags of butterscotch chips in my freezer, and they worked wonderfully in this recipe. I want to make it sometime with either cinnamon chips or semisweet.

They’re called “No-Fail Pan Cookies”. I found the recipe on Anna’s blog – Cookie Madness. Here’s a photo of mine in the pan; I didn’t take a photo of them cut out. They don’t rise much, so they look sort of flat. But, boy, they have a great flavor! We really like them. As always, be sure to read my notes at the bottom, although I didn’t really make any changes to this one. It’s simple and easy and good just the way it is 🙂

I just posted the recipe on our main site, Hambones.org. Click here to get the recipe, and I’ll also paste it on the extended page.

Happy Baking!

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Do you have a food processor? If so, what kind and how often do you use it? I have an older one that my mom gave me years and years ago. It’s an Oster (Sunbeam) brand, and it has a small food processor cup with just one blade, and then a blender attachment. I like it because it gives me both, but I’ve often wanted more functionality out of it. It doesn’t have a tube for adding things, nor does it have any blades but the one simple cutting blade. It’s also really small, probably either a 3 cup or 5 cup capacity. I really like it, it’s worked well over the years, but sometimes I get the urge for a new one 😀

I’ve batted around for years, the whole dilemma of finding room in my overflowing kitchen cabinets to upgrade and get a larger and nicer food processor. I’ve gone back and forth on the whole Kitchenaid vs Cuisinart thing. I watch so many cooking shows, and I see them both used, often and fairly equally. {Oh, and since we’ve gotten our DVR, I record and watch a ton more cooking shows. Heavens to Betsy!} 😀

I can’t decide. My main concern is cleaning out enough cabinet space to store the thing! I still haven’t spent any of my Blingo winnings, so I have money for a new appliance. I just can’t decide what to get!

Let me know if you have one, how big it is, what brand, how often you use it, what you use it for, and so on and so forth! Inquiring minds want to know 🙂

Have a great day!

I wish that I had a “real” menu to post this week. But, with Tim being out of town some on business and hunting the other days (before deer season ends around here), I’ll be alone for dinnertime almost every day this week. Which is ok by me, because that means less cooking! But it doesn’t make for an interesting post. 😀

The general idea when Tim is not here for supper is that I don’t cook. I don’t know how those of you who cook for one do it!!! I can’t seem to bring myself to cook when it’s just me. I can barely cook some days for the two of us, but most of the time I do, and I enjoy it. 🙂 Tim is a great guy to cook for. He likes to eat, always says something nice about what I prepare, and is always open to trying something new. When it’s just me though, I’m happy with something simple. A bowl of cereal or oatmeal. Some popcorn. A can of soup. A Lean Cuisine. Easy and no cooking required. This week, I plan to eat some leftover Chinese food for supper one or two nights, breakfast food one night and probably a Lean Cuisine another night. I’ll probably get back to cooking later in the week or next weekend, but right now I don’t have anything planned.

That said, I thought I’d ask a menu-planning/cooking “Question of the Day“: Let’s say you participate in Menu Plan Monday, or you occasionally browse online for recipes. What do you do when you find recipes you might want to try one day? Do you print them out and file them somewhere? Do you save them to your computer? If so, how and where do you save them (to a Word document, a cooking program, an email folder, etc)?

As for me, I do a mix of those things. Sometimes I go ahead and print them out. They get put in one of my infamous and ever growing “piles” in the kitchen or office. (The piles are for placing in a binder I started last year but am already behind on 🙁 ) Sometimes I go ahead and put them in my Mastercook software, in a “to-try” type cookbook. But, the majority of the time (and overwhelmingly so, probably 95% of the time), I put them in an email folder called “Recipes”. Which is great, except those are stored on my laptop that died. Which is supposed to be delivered back home to me today. So, we’ll see later today if I’ve still got all of those recipes, and a thousand other things, I had stored on my laptop. Sigh. 🙂

Leave me a comment and let me know what you do when you find a recipe online that you might want to try. And, have a great day!

Still busy here, but having a blast. Tim is on vacation all week, and my sister Gail came Monday and stayed 2 days with us. She’ll be back tomorrow (Thurs) with her family, and my dad will drive up, for the big day. Or maybe I should say, the “big meal”. Because after all, Thanksgiving is mostly about the food, isn’t it?!

Here’s what we’re having tomorrow:

Cheese and Crackers for an appetizer
Turkey
Gail’s Squash Dressing
Cranberry Sauce
Broccoli Casserole
Sweet Potato Casserole
Green Bean Bundles
Rolls
Pecan Pie
Creme Brulee Cheesecake

Hopefully, we’ll all get to watch a little football, before or after, and maybe get a little exercise in after eating. I’m hoping to either get out and walk a bit, or get out with the guys and watch them hit golf balls in the backyard. I know the weather should be pretty good tomorrow – we’re expecting a line of thunderstorms to move through later today and drop our temps from the high 70’s to the low 50’s. It should feel more like Thanksgiving tomorrow 😀 Hopefully, the rain will be gone and we can all get out and get a little bit of fresh air and exercise after the feasting 😛

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

I updated my Project365 blog last night, and it seems that I’m doing more blogging over there than here. Go figure. I assume that once this project is over, I’ll go back to more “normal” blogging here, whatever that means. I’ll go back to posting photos here, and talking about what we are doing or did. I just don’t seem to have an interesting enough life to maintain entries on two blogs 🙄

Let’s see… I blogged here and here about what all we did over the weekend. This past weekend had a lot of golf! I went with Tim on Friday afternoon to the golf course, to hang out with him. It’s Tim’s most ardent desire in life that I learn to love golf, want to play, and that we can go together to play golf 5 or 6 days a week. Sadly, this is not my goal in life! I really don’t like golf that much. The idea of taking that piece of metal and swinging at that little ball holds absolutely no appeal to me at the moment 🙂 Saturday was also a day of golf – for Tim. He went to the PGA tournament that took place near our house. Sunday, my dad drove up and we all went to the German Fest near our house.

We’re back into a decent slate of watching TV most every night. We’re trying a couple of new shows – Chuck on Mondays, Bionic Woman on Wednesdays and Tim started watching and liked “Life” on NBC on Wednesday night (right after Bionic Woman). We’ve cut way down on our movie watching from Netflix, now that all of the fall shows have started. We have, however, picked up a new TV show, via Netflix. Tim watched several episodes of “Heroes” last year and was always trying to get me to watch. This year, as last year, I felt like I had enough shows that I watched and hated to start anymore, so I resisted. Now, we are renting Season 1 of Heroes via Netflix and I’m already hooked. He was right – this is my kind of show. Sigh. We’re also still watching, slowly, the Gilmore Girls on DVD. We’ve made it through 3 seasons and have ordered the next two on DVD. And, of course, there’s LOTS of football on TV! 😀

I’ve still been reading a fair amount. I’ve recently finished “1st to Die” by James Patterson – the first in the Women’s Murder Club series books. I had wanted to read one of these to see how gory or descriptive of violence they were. Nothing I can’t handle, so I’ve got another new series to read. I wanted to read one of these before the new TV show started, based on these books. I think it starts in mid-October and stars Angie Harmon. I hope it will be a good show! Let’s see, I’ve read another couple of books that were just so-so for me. I read “The Tavern on Maple Street” by Sharon Owens. I’ve read one other by Owens before, she’s very similar to Maeve Binchy, a good Irish writer. It was good, just so-so for me. As was “Underdog” by Laurien Berenson. She apparently writes cozy type mysteries with dog titles, so I had hoped I would love these. This one I read was just okay for me too. The dog is a Standard Poodle and there was a lot in this book about dog shows, and grooming dogs for showing, which doesn’t interest me at all. I might give one more of her books a chance, someday. I also finished “The Redemption of Sarah Cain” by Beverly Lewis, another good Amish book. Up next, I have another cozy mystery by Laura Levine. I read one by her recently entitled “This Pen for Hire” and enjoyed it. Hopefully I will like this new one “The PMS Murder” also. Then, after that, I have the last book in the Firstborn series by Karen Kingsbury (“Forever“) and the most recent one by Janet Evanovich “Lean Mean Thirteen“. I have been on the wait list for a long time for the latest Stephanie Plum book. I started out as number 16 on the wait list at the library, and now my time has come! 🙂 Oh, and for the record, I’ve completed 87 books so far this year, with a total of 25,855 pages read. 🙂

I have also checked out a couple of cookbooks from the library, and have been busy going through those. I’ve gone through one completely – Taste of Home Everyday Light Meals. I’ve copied out over 20 recipes that interested me. It looks like a good cookbook, but since I’ve gone through and “got what I wanted”, I won’t be buying this one for my shelves. I’ll post a listing on the extended page of the recipes I copied out. If anyone would like to see a copy of the recipe, I can email it to you. I haven’t made any of these recipes yet, so I can’t vouch for how they taste!

I’ve still be in a bit of a fall cleaning mode around here. Heaven help me, but I’ve even started cleaning windows! Gasp. That doesn’t happen very often. I wonder if the earth stopped rotating on its axis for a bit 😀

Hope everyone has a great day!

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