Exceedingly Mundane

As seen recently on Magnolia Mom‘s blog… any meme related to FOOD is right up my alley!

1. How do you like your eggs? Any which way, as long as the white is not runny (I think that’s called “sunny side up”). I eat poached eggs, boiled eggs, scrambled eggs, eggs over easy (fried).

2. How do you take your coffee/tea? Coffee with lots of Splenda and creamer. Flavored creamer. Currently have White Chocolate Raspberry and French Vanilla in the fridge. Tea needs a bit of Splenda to sweeten it also. It’s a Southern “thang”, I guess 😀

3. Favorite breakfast food: I never met a breakfast food I didn’t like. I love cereal, eggs, bacon, sausage, grits, oatmeal, pancakes, waffles, and the list goes on and on.

4. Peanut butter – smooth or crunchy? Smooth for me. I won’t turn down crunchy, but I’d rather have creamy.

5. What kind of dressing on your salad? Honey mustard, a vinaigrette or most anything will be fine for me 🙂

6. Coke or Pepsi? COKE. Coke Zero specifically. If I go somewhere with only Pepsi products available, I want Code Red or Dr Pepper

7. You’re feeling lazy, what do you make? Breakfast food, rumien (Tim’s pumped up ramen noodle concoction), or maybe spaghetti

8. You’re feeling really lazy. What kind of pizza do you order? Tim would order supreme, but if I got to pick, it would either be a Hawaiian (pineapple and Canadian bacon or ham) or a pepperoni and mushroom combo

9. You feel like cooking. What do you make? A big pot of homemade soup and a loaf of homemade bread.

10. Do any foods bring back good memories? Chicken and dumplings or chicken and rice. I also have wonderful memories of some special meals out with Tim 🙂

11. Do any foods bring back bad memories? BEETS. I have a story that I’ve been meaning to blog about for ages. About how I had to sit at the table until I finished my plate. My plate had beets on it, even though I begged and pleaded for none to be put on my plate. I sat there for about 6 hours, until finally my mom screamed at my dad so much he finally let me get up. Which was wonderful, since I had had to pee for like 3 hours 🙁

12. Do any foods remind you of someone? Some foods remind me of Tim and others remind me of my grandmother. Oddly enough, I don’t remember any special ones from my mom, which is so sad.

More questions on the next page… 🙂
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I got out my bread machine this afternoon, to make some buttermilk wheat bread. I’ve made this recipe before, and it’s really good. I opened up my wheat flour and it smelled horrible – rancid. That happens a lot to me here. With our heat and humidity, I can’t keep wheat flour for very long. I’ve tried putting it in the freezer, but it doesn’t seem to rise as much. So, I tossed the whole thing and set out to find another recipe.

I looked around on AllRecipes.com and found a similar recipe that uses buttermilk and all white bread flour. This bread turned out really good! I think we really enjoyed it with our potato soup tonight because we don’t normally have white bread – I usually make bread with at least some wheat flour.

I just entered the recipe on Hambones.org, here. Here’s what it looked like when we cut it (and yes, it was right out of the oven. Tim can’t wait. It was hot and still steaming):

As I alluded to in this post last week, I’ve made several new recipes lately, and wanted to share them. Some of them are from several months ago, and I realized when I was looking for one recipe, that they were printed out in a pile and had never been entered. Most of them I’ve made in August, and they’ve all been, by and large, successes for us, and something I would make again.

Several of these came from blogs that I read. Some are “food” type blogs that I peruse on Mondays (via Menu Plan Monday) or Thursday (via Slow Cooking Thursday) – two food related weekly memes that I really like.

I’ve entered them all on my main website – Hambones.org. Here’s a list of the recipes and links to them. Enjoy!

Crockpot Sweet and Sour Pork Chops – Tim really liked this one!
Crockpot Cherry Cobbler – Tim liked this more than I did. Will make again and make some modifications
Crockpot Parmesan Potatoes – very easy and a good side dish, but pretty mushy
Dilled Potato Salad – adapted a LOT from a recipe in Southern Living magazine, this is portioned for two people
Crockpot Meatball Soup – adapted from a recipe I found at a blog, but I didn’t note which blog. If it’s your recipe, thanks for posting, it was really good!
Jenna’s Teriyaki Chicken – a really good one; we had with a boxed teriyaki noodle mix and frozen egg rolls. Good, quick, Chinese type meal – thank you Jenna!
Claire’s Tater Tuna Pie – different from a regular tuna casserole, we really liked it! Thanks to Claire for posting it on her blog!

Yum, now I’m hungry! Here’s hoping that the weather cools off a bit in September, and I can start back making more soups, chowders and homemade bread 🙂

I tried a couple of new recipes last week and they were both “keepers” in our house. I’ve also been making bread the last two weeks, using the dough cycle on my bread machine. You know, my 7 year old breadmaker that has been languishing in storage in the garage for a couple of years. I wasn’t even sure it would work, but so far so good. 🙂

The first recipe is for “Honey Lime Chicken“, and it’s one I swiped from my blog buddy Dawn, over at “Thoughts from Along the Broken Road“. I used 5 chicken tenders for the two of us, but I’m sure you could use regular boneless skinless breasts and double the sauce to serve 4. This recipe fit us really well, with it making 2 servings. It’s not often that happens! The recipe is posted over at our main site, Hambones.org, click here. (Oh, be sure to read my notes at the bottom – I almost always make some kind of change or modification, or suggestions for the next time I make a recipe, and I always put that in the notes at the bottom 🙂 )

The second recipe is one that I found in my new Taste of Home “Great American Cookout” cookbook I bought recently. It is for Teriyaki Kebobs, and we used a piece of sirloin steak for the meat. I posted a photo of the kebobs on the grill over on my photoblog (check it out here). The recipe is posted here at Hambones.org 🙂

The last recipe is for “Light Oat Bread“, and is one I found while blog-surfing (photo). The original recipe is at AllRecipes.com, here. I made it almost as-is the first time I made it, except I substituted bread flour for the all purpose flour, and I added vital wheat gluten. That’s something I have always done to my dough in the bread machine. I think it makes it rise more, and produces a better loaf. The first week I made this bread, I used all white flour. The second time, I used 2 cups white bread flour and 1 cup whole wheat flour (and I added a bit more vital wheat gluten, since wheat doesn’t rise as well for me as white flour dough). The loaf is not as high and light, but it’s still good. And hopefully a bit healthier for us. I’ve posted my version of this recipe here.

I need to work on my menu for this upcoming week… and maybe find another new recipe or two to try 🙂

For those of you who visit my Project365 photoblog, you know that I went to the Farmer’s Market on Saturday with my sister Gail. One of the things I picked up was a pint of fresh locally grown blueberries. I asked Tim this morning what he wanted me to make him with the blueberries. As per usual, he said it didn’t matter, for me to pick. Not feeling very decisive, I persisted and gave him several choices – blueberry coffeecake, blueberry bread, blueberry cobbler, blueberry muffins, etc and he picked muffins.

I looked through several cookbooks I have here and also cruised my favorite recipe site, AllRecipes.com, before finally deciding to use this recipe, along with a lot of the comments that I read through. The recipe I ended up making was not all that much like the original, but the result was really good!

I used my red silicone muffin pan, and that was a mistake – the batter is heavy and the muffins spread, so with the flimsy silicone, they really oozed out all over the pan! (Photo here). They taste really good, though, and that’s all that matters. We each had one, hot out of the oven, with some butter melted on it, and they were delicious. I asked Tim to rate them on a scale of 1 to 10 and he gave them (hot out of the oven), a 10. We’ll see how they taste tomorrow warmed back up!

The recipe is here, over at Hambones. I’ll also post it below. These are NOT low-fat, but I did make a few changes so they weren’t quite as bad as the original. I would have liked to have tried them with some whole wheat flour for half the white flour, some Splenda for the sugar, and other substitutions. But, when I had asked Tim if he wanted “low fat or full fat?” – he answered, “full fat”. Shhh, don’t tell him I used a couple of low-fat substitutions in this recipe 😀

The recipe is on the extended page, so click there if you’re so inclined!
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Kim tagged me for this fun “where do you like to eat” restaurant meme that is going around. Goodness knows, we eat out enough and have tons of places we like to go!

A lot of the places we go are chains (Chili’s, Applebee’s, Red Lobster, Olive Garden), so I debated about whether to include those on this list. I could have easily listed 5 chain places and a host of foods we like to eat there. The Oriental Salad at Applebee’s is a favorite of mine, as well as the molten lava cakes for dessert at Chili’s. Then, there’s pizza, but we won’t go that route. Instead, we’ll go totally local.

1. Fratesi’s – a local Italian place that I love. It’s sort of small and a bit run down, but the food is so good. I’ve never had a single thing there that wasn’t totally delicious. You start out with their hot homemade bread and garlic butter, then move to their delicious salad (the house salad dressing is the best of any place we eat at), and then your entree. When we go to an Italian place, I always order tiramisu for dessert. Theirs is very good 🙂

2. Cazadores – another local place, this one Mexican. We have 5 or 6 Mexican restaurants within a 3 or 4 mile radius of our house and we have been going to Cazadore’s almost exclusively lately. The food is good and the service is great. A guy is usually at our table with chips and salsa about 5 seconds after we sit down. Our food is usually delivered to our table within 5-6 minutes of ordering. And it’s always hot and delicious. They also have really good guacamole. I love guacamole, but I’m really particular about it. I don’t like tomato, so I don’t like it with chunks of tomato in it. And I have this weird aversion to cilantro, so I don’t like cilantro in mine. Cazadore’s guacamole is perfect for me – very creamy, no tomatoes, no cilantro. Good stuff.

3. Golden Dragon – yet another local place. This is where we like to go for Chinese food. They have a buffet on Friday and Saturday nights, which we go to sometimes. Tim likes it because they have steaks on the buffet, plus boiled shrimp, so he can eat that and not have to eat as much Chinese food! I love their pineapple chicken and their shrimp and cabbage dish they have on the buffet. If we order, we sometimes splurge and get their Shrimp and Kew dinner – which is a slew of appetizers and samplings of food, followed by a tableside cooking of shrimp, strips of filet mignon and Chinese style vegetables at our table. Wonderful stuff. We don’t splurge on it that often, but if we order from the menu, I usually order the shrimp and cabbage. I could eat that stuff 7 days a week, I think.

4. Cock of the Walk – this is a chain, but we have a great one here and have for over 25 years. I can remember going here in college, because the food is so good and the atmosphere is great. It’s so laid back and casual, we can go in wearing a tshirt and shorts and be totally comfortable. They basically do one thing – fried catfish with all of the trimmings. We order fish for two, and very soon, a large platter with fried catfish, french fries, hushpuppies, coleslaw, pickled onions and cornbread come out to the table. The cornbread, of course, is flipped in its cast iron skillet, tableside, by your waiter. You can also order fried dill pickles, which are to die for, promise. So much food, but not good for us, since everything is fried. We don’t go often but we love it when we splurge and go!

5. Pigskin – Another local place, a family owned restaurant that specializes in BBQ and recently added a lunch buffet (country type cooking, blue plate, meat and veggie type of stuff). We’ve been for lunch, but we mostly go for the barbecue. They have great ribs! Good sides (coleslaw, baked beans, fries, potato salad) and really big chunks of texas toast with the ribs. They have the best caramel cake for dessert, but we rarely get that, as we fill up on ribs and sides.

Honorable Mention: I asked Tim about his 5 and he said he would include Lenny’s Subs (sandwich place). They have a great chicken phillysteak sandwich that we always get. If he is picking a sandwich place, then I would probably pick Newk’s instead. Newk’s is a little pricier than Lenny’s, but the food is really good. Newk’s also has some awesome salads. 🙂

I know the origins of this meme had you list your name, location, your 5 choices, then you were to tag 5 people from different areas of the country or the world. I’m not going to do that, but if you’d like to play along, that would be great! Leave me a comment and let me know so that I can come visit and see your favorite places to eat 🙂

I’ve been known to go overboard on lots of things. It’s the “hoarding” or packrat mentality that I possess. Tim often jokes that if there is an empty space, I will fill it. I have enough toilet paper, paper towels, toothpaste and the like stashed around here for us for months on end. He got really worried when we got the new refrigerator, thinking I would go hog wild and go out and buy tons of food — just to fill it up 🙂 Silly boy. And oh, he says we should never move into a house with a walk-in pantry. He says I will be at Sam’s Club every week, buying stuff we can’t possibly eat in a lifetime.

Anyway, this mentality reared its ugly head, just a little, yesterday when I was grocery shopping. I stopped by the milk (ack, it’s up to 3.57 for a gallon of store brand skim milk, and going up every week, it seems), and I also needed to grab a creamer. Here’s what is residing in my refrigerator now:

I had blogged about seeing this Blueberry Cobbler flavor earlier and swore up and down I wouldn’t want to try it. It’s the thought of it being blue, I think. But then Sparky Duck emailed me and told me he had tried it and he really liked it, so I thought I would give it a try. I also spied another “limited edition” flavor in the International Delights brand, White Chocolate Raspberry. So, I couldn’t, you know, just let it sit there! There was only one there, so I had to get it 🙂

Yes, the first step is admitting you have a problem…

I’m not quite sure why, but several of you asked to see what my new fridge looked like, once I had moved all of the food into it. I thought I’d go ahead and do this while it’s all nice and shiny and clean, and most of all – organized!

Remember my new fridge on Sunday, totally empty, waiting to cool off for the required amount of time:

Here’s what it looked like late Monday night after I had moved everything from old small refrigerator into the new side by side:

And this is a built in slot area on the door, that I’m not quite sure what it’s meant for. We don’t buy canned drinks, so I don’t even have a can to test to see if they fit in the slots. Tim thinks it’s too small for cans and I think he’s right. Irregardless, it seems like a perfect place to put my yogurt, so that’s what it is for NOW!

What I really like about this refrigerator is that it’s so adjustable. Almost all of the shelves on both sides are adjustable, I can move them up and down and rearrange them. All of the drawers on the door are movable, and I’ve moved them up and down several times trying to get stuff to fit. Same thing on the freezer side. The freezer has two pull out drawers, but the shelves are able to be moved up and down. And the openings on the door side of the freezer tilt out, which is really nice. All in all, very customizable, which is one reason we picked this one.

OK, I’m going grocery shopping later today, so I’ll have to see what I can do about filling it up more! 😀 I wanted to go ahead and post a picture, because it will probably never look this good again, LOL!

Now that the weather is really warming up, I’m trying to fix more salads with our meals. I know, this is something I should do year round, but in the winter, I mostly want to make comfort foods like soups, stews and lots of bread 🙂 This time of year, we grill out more, and I try to buy more fresh fruits and vegetables.

I’ve bought lettuce the last two weeks and have been trying to fix a “side salad” with our nighttime meal. But, I seem to just be putting the same thing in our salads. I need some new ideas.

Here’s the problem – I don’t eat tomatoes and Tim doesn’t eat cucumbers. I know, I know – I could buy cucumbers for me and tomatoes for him, but it just seems easier to skip those since half of us don’t eat them. I have some things on hand (croutons, craisins, etc) that I could add, but I’m trying to watch the calorie content of what I put in the salad. You know, trying to stay healthy. So, I’ve been adding these things to our green salads: carrots, mushrooms (marinated, usually, not fresh), olives, pickles and sometimes hard-boiled eggs, and if I have it, red onion. Sometimes we sneak in some grated cheese, too. I would like to add more veggies, but I don’t seem to buy them often enough to use them up. If I plan ahead, I like to buy a bag of fresh broccoli, cauliflower and carrots and add that to the salad, but that doesn’t happen very often. Oh, and I would add fruit, dried or fresh, but Tim doesn’t “do” fruit, especially in a salad. I have a recipe for a great Oriental type green salad that has mandarin oranges in it and Tim won’t go near it. I have to add the oranges just to mine 🙄

So, that’s today’s Question of the Day – what do you add to your salad? What kinds of things do you keep on hand to put in a salad, and what healthy items do you add to your salad? As you can see, my vegetable crisper in my brand new refrigerator is very empty:

Help, I need some ideas! 😀

Judi, over at Mommy of Two‘s blog, is so sweet! She wrote me and suggested a couple of great questions that I can ask here on my blog, as a “Question of the Day“. Thanks Judi! I hope everyone has a chance to stop by and leave us a comment!

Here’s her first question – do you eat the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables a day? Do you come close?

I did a quick Google search on fruits and veggies and found the following info at this site:

Fruits and Vegetables

Fruits and vegetables are rich in nutrients. Many are excellent sources of vitamin A, vitamin C, folate or potassium. They are low in fat and sodium and high in fiber. The Food Pyramid suggests 3 to 5 servings of vegetables each day. One serving of vegetables can be:

1 cup of raw leafy vegetables
1/2 cup of other vegetables, cooked or raw
3/4 cup of vegetable juice

The Food Pyramid suggests 2 to 4 servings of fruit each day. One serving of fruit can be:

One medium apple, orange or banana
1/2 cup of chopped, cooked or canned fruit
3/4 cup of fruit juice
Count only 100% fruit juice as a fruit, and limit juice consumption. Many commercial bottled juices come in containers that hold more than 2 servings – which can add lots of sugar and calories to your daily diet. Punches, ades and most fruit “drinks” have only a bit of juice and lots of sugar. Fruit sodas are sugary drinks, and they don’t count as fruit, either.

Me first – I try, I really do, but I think most days I fall really short. I honestly am not sure if the info that I posted above is up to date (I admit, I didn’t spend that long searching!). I actually thought they had raised it to a recommended 7-9 servings a day. Irregardless, I don’t think I get enough. I want to eat better and try to make healthy meals for us. I try to make better choices when we eat out, but that is really hard. When we eat out, it’s sort of a splurge and I tend to make bad choices. However, I think I do better than Tim does, just because I love fruit and eat more of it than he does (as well as yogurt, dried fruit and other things he won’t touch). I also drink a glass of orange juice every morning with breakfast, and I think that counts as a serving. I’d say on a good day, I might eat 3-4 servings of fruit and vegetables a day, but I would fall really short of 7-9.

So, how about you? Do you eat the recommended amount per day? About how many do you think you eat?

Yippee! Look what just came in the mail!!!!

For those of you who don’t remember, back in early January of this year, I shamelessly begged asked if anyone had any “cookbook points” from Nabisco brand boxes of crackers or cookies. So many of you were so sweet and so very generous, and you guys all pitched in and mailed me enough points to not only get a cookbook for myself, but to share with my sister Gail, so she could get one. And even though we had a bit of a scare back in March (when this little notify card came in, saying it would be a couple more months before it was shipped), I’m happy to say that the cookbook arrived today! Yeah! I can’t wait to start going through it 🙂

Oh yes, and add it to my much beloved cookbook collection, which, as fate would have it, I just blogged about a couple of days ago, LOL! Believe it or not, this is my very first Rachael Ray cookbook.

So, Thank You, Thank You, Thank You, to all of you who helped out — I really appreciate it! 🙂

Ahh, cookbooks. I love cookbooks! Cookbooks are another serious obsession for me. I love to look at them, read them like books, look at the pretty pictures, dream about all of the recipes I want to try, etc. I use those little post-it flags sometimes to mark the pages of the recipes I want to make. I always have the best of intentions. And yet, I rarely cook out of them. I do try a few things, but for the most part, I just like to have them to look at and maybe use “one day”.

I also daydream about the day when I get a bigger kitchen and I can put my cookbooks on some shelves in the kitchen, or nearby. Right now, the majority of my cookbooks are in an old bookcase in the hall, nowhere near my kitchen. One day, I hope to have a built-in set of shelves on the side of an island or cabinet, or maybe a built-in desk area with shelves above it, so I can display my favorite cookbooks. I do have a few in the kitchen, in a wooden cookbook stand on top of my refrigerator. But, I have so many that storing them is an issue. Some of them are here:

That’s today’s Question of the Day: Do you like cookbooks? Do you buy many cookbooks? Do you cook out of them much, if you do? And equally important, where do you store yours? If you really want to get all involved with your answer, give me a ballpark estimate on how many cookbooks you have. You can also tell me which one is your favorite, if you can pick just one. I can’t! 🙂

P.S. I’m cheating again, and using this for today’s photo over at my Project 365 blog. Blogger privilege

I admit it – I’m a sucker for most every thing that Sonic makes. We love Sonic. They have good food, great drinks and even better desserts. We love all of their Blasts (like a Blizzard at Dairy Queen, which we don’t have here any more). And we love their shakes. This month, they have this:

Seriously – what’s not to love? Ice cream blended with hot fudge sauce and Oreo cookies. We had one this weekend… and I intend to have more before April is over! 😀

Today’s question is short and sweet – when you eat spaghetti, do you twirl it or cut it?

Here’s why I ask – tonight, we’re having a new recipe for a crockpot chicken spaghetti. I make regular spaghetti a lot (red meat or ground turkey or prebought meatballs), and I’ve made chicken spaghetti (baked in the oven) before. This is a new recipe and I’m looking forward to trying it. I’ll report back on it next Monday, via the Menu Plan Monday, with my thoughts on the recipe. Anyway, every time we have spaghetti I notice that Tim and I are different. He’s a twirler, and I’m a cutter. I like to chop my spaghetti up into short strands with my fork, then scoop it up. Tim twirls and twirls and then jams a huge wad of noodles in his mouth. 🙂

So, that’s today’s Question of the Day – do you cut or twirl your spaghetti? Leave me a comment and let me know. You know, since this is such an earth-shattering topic and all. 😀

Here I go, swiping from fellow bloggers again! As seen here on Dawn’s blog:

Condiments

1. What do you like on a hot dog? Mayonnaise and mustard. No ketchup unless Tim makes me. I can do onion but I’m not fond of relish. I like sauerkraut on my brats, but that’s not technically a hot dog. Just lots of mayo, please.

2. What do you like on a hamburger? Lots of mayo, some mustard, one drop of ketchup. A slice of dill pickle. Some red onion. If I feel like I can have the extra calories, some cheese.

3. What do you like on a baked potato? Load it up, baby! Everything – butter, sour cream, bacon bits, cheese, anything. Yummy, I love loaded potatoes 🙂

4. What do you like on a slice of toast? Butter and jelly. I’ll eat most any kind of jelly, as long as it’s smooth, without chunks like slivers of orange in orange marmalade. My favorite would be grape or strawberry or raspberry, I guess.

5. What do you like in a cup of coffee or tea? Coffee, I need Splenda and some flavored creamer (not the powdered kind). In tea, I need sugar. In hot tea, I usually use honey or Splenda.

And, along the same lines, how about an easy Question of the Day: Spring is around the corner, and we’ll be grilling out more. Let’s say we’re having a cookout at our house, and you’re invited. We’re grilling out hamburgers and hotdogs – which would you pick? Leave me a comment and let me know!