Pumpkins!!

Sorry the pictures aren't better...I still don't know how to use all the settings on my camera.

 Tiny Evil Ninja!

 Fiona's Cat

 Brianna's Fairy

 Josh's Happy Face (courtesy of mom)

Levi's Cityscape

The Whole Gang

So like...does this make me a grown-up?

I made pot roast for dinner the other night! (yes, one of the OAMC recipes.)

It turned out pretty darn perfect, if I do say so myself. Not that it was hard - throw it in the crock pot before work, take it out after work - but like I've said before, crock pots make me nervous.

Really, the hardest part (have I made this speech before?) was at the grocery store, figuring out which hunk of meat was a "pot roast."  Or rather...the right kind of pot roast. There were, like...a half a dozen or more different cuts of beef whose labels all included the words "pot" and "roast." Usually with two or three other descriptives in between.  I must have guessed right, though, because the end result was supremely edible.


(My mother is shamed, SHAMED, I tell you, to have raised a daughter who doesn't know how to pick out a pot roast at the grocery store.)

World's Biggest Hula Hoop?

This video is kind of long (6 minutes) but some of the tricks she can do with this oversize hoop are AMAZING.

OAMC Review: Upside-Down Fettucini Bake

 

'Nuff said.  

Okay fine! :D This recipe looked really promising, so I took a leap of faith and doubled it (it didn't make enough to split) and boy am I glad I did!  Huge, mongo hit with the whole family.  Here's the recipe:

Upside Down Fettucini Bake

1/2 lb italian sausage (hot, sweet or mixed)

1/4 onion, chopped 

8 oz fettucini

1-14.5 oz can  diced tomatoes

1 tsp dried oregano

1/2 c mozzarella cheese, shredded

1/2 c parmesan cheese, grated, divided

3 eggs, lightly beaten

2 Tbsp melted butter

2 Tbsp parsley flakes

1/2 tsp chopped garlic

Cook fettucini according to package directions. Meanwhile brown sausage in a medium skillet; add onion in last few minutes.  Drain excess fat. Add tomatoes and their juice to sausage mixture. Add oregano and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer covered, stirring occasionally, 20 minutes.

Stir mozzarella into sausage mixture. Sprinkle in half the parmesan (1/4 c).

Mix eggs, remaining parmesan, butter, garlic and parsley in medium bowl. Toss in fettucini until well coated. 

Spread pasta mixture in bottom of 10-inch quiche or round cake pan. Layer sausage mixture on top.

Freezing instructions: At this point, cover with heavy-duty aluminum foil and freeze.  Thaw completely before baking.

Baking instructions: Bake uncovered at 350 degrees for 30 minutes or until heated through.  Cut into wedges and serve.  Serves 6.

 My notes: I'd prefer it with a little more everything - a little more spice, a little more onion. Maybe a can of tomato sauce or pizza sauce. I couldn't find a 10" pan to save my life, so I jammed it into a 9-incher.   It *barely* fed the four of us (Josh had a sliver; Levi, Brianna and I devoured the rest). Next time, I'm going to double it and build it in a 9x13 pan instead of the 9" round so that we have lunches. In theory. 

Cooking Experiment Recap, and Round 2

Last night, we polished off the very last meal from September's Once-A-Month-Cooking experiment! We stretched 12 recipes, 20 meals, over a full month, so...I guess 10 nights of eating out for one reason or another. Levi figures we reduced our food expenses for September by 50% by (mostly) not scrambling for last minute dinners. There were a couple days where we'd forget to pull something out to thaw. :( Anyway, since all the meals were reasonably edible, we called it a Win and decided to do it again for October. But more about that in a minute. First, here's a quick recap/review of our Round 1 meals:

• Meatball Sub Casserole (2x): This dish went over well with Levi and Brianna, not so much with me. I don't know if it was recipe failure or pilot error, but the bread layer came out...gluey. Ick. Thinking this might work better with traditional lasagna noodles or something, if we do it again.
• Easy Spaghetti Sauce (2x): This recipe was "easy" because it's base is three family-sized cans of tomato soup. Boring. And really, really sweet. Not a big hit with my family. There's another, more traditional (there's that word again!) sauce recipe in one of the other menu cycles that I'd like to try.
• Orrechiette with Tuna: We ate this the very first night. It was...all right. I liked it, Brianna and Levi tolerated it. It was actually better as leftovers, hot or cold.
  
• Sweet Mustard Grilled Pork: We ate this one just in the last week. The recipe lists the cooking options as 30 minutes on the grill or 2 hours in the oven. We opted for the grill, but screwed it up, and blackened the outside. Still really, really good! Definitely going to do this one again, and try not to burn it in the future. It would pair really well with fried rice.
  
• Steak Milanesa: This was basically steak with a garlic-and-cilantro based marinade. Easy, different and good.
• Chicken Naranja (2x): The first time we cooked this, it was awesome. Even the leftovers were good (and leftover chicken can be tricky). The second time, I don't know what happened but the sauce went wonky and congealed in the oven instead of staying...saucy. Still edible, although not as good as the first time.
• Chicken Dijon (2x): Winner! Came out perfect both times. We had this with stuffing instead of rice and OMG, yum.
  
• BBQed Chicken Sandwiches (2x): This was our crock pot meal. I discovered crock pots make me nervous. I don't like having food cooking while I'm not home, and I also don't trust it to cook everything (read: the raw chicken) through. The recipe itself was good, although if you cook it down far enough to not be barbecue soup, there's not nearly as many servings as the recipe indicates - which is fine, because the count is supposed to be 24 sandwiches. That's a LOT.
• Mini Cheese Meatloaves: I don't want to talk about it.

Okay, fine. The meatloaf was a huge failure, and it was all my fault. Instead of two small loaves side by side in a square pan, I just mashed the mixture into one big flat loaf. And I baked it. And the top half was wonderful, and the bottom half was pink (I do *not* understand how people eat rare hamburgers or steak. Gag.). It was only as I was throwing away the inedible leftovers that I realized...I had two disposable foil pans stuck together. Woe is me...no wonder the damn thing didn't cook. Anyway, the edible part was REALLY good. I love meatloaf anyway, and this version was excellent. Can't wait to try it again. Properly.

• Gnocchi with Turkey Ragu (2x): Gnocchi, in case you weren't aware (like me), is kind of like little pasta bullets, except it's made from potatoes. I wasn't particularly thrilled - the texture was weird, and I'm weird about textures. The Ragu (Italian for meat-based sauce - clever, eh?), which I made with ground beef instead of ground turkey, was quite good, though. The second batch, we ate over egg noodles.
• Poppy Seed Chicken (2x): This was probably my favorite recipe out of this whole cycle. Classic baked chicken with cream sauce, with a crunchy breadcrumb-and-poppyseed topping. I think we had this over...rice? Ah...looked it up...wild rice pilaf. A perfect pairing.
  
• Last but not least: Hamburger Salsa Skillet: Good, basic. Not amazing. Needed more salsa.
  

For October, we opted for another Two Week cycle, again figuring on splitting several of the entree's to stretch it out for close to a month of eating. I shopped on Tuesday afternoon and Levi and I spent Wednesday afternoon doing all the prep and most of the cooking, and I finished the cooking on Thursday afternoon (there are lots of parts of my job I don't like, but can't complain about the hours!). Here's what we've got on deck:

• Southwestern Egg Casserole (2)
  
• Macaroni with Ham (2)
  
• Upside-Down Fettucini Bake (2 - was supposed to be 1 but looked good enough that I doubled it)
• Chicken & Dumplings (2)
  
• Chicken Durango (2)
  
• Chicken Scampi (2)
  
• Texas-Style Lasagna (2)
  
• Beef Pot Roast (1)
  
• Teriyaki Hamburgers (2 - again, doubled)
  
• George Romney Meatballs (1)
• Vegetable Soup with Meatballs (2)

We're skipping the Four Seasons Pizza, Coronation Chicken, Lime Grilled Mahi Mahi, and the Black Beans with Jasmine Rice - all which have questionable ingredients. Will let you know how this batch goes, but based on how everything smelled as it was being cooked and assembled, I think we've got some serious winners. :)

Kitchen Experiment Part 2: Cooking Day!

Grab a drink and put your feet up, this entry is a long one. First, here's our menu:

• Easy Spaghetti Sauce
• Meatball Sub Casserole
• Orecchiette with Tuna
• Sweet Mustard Grilled Pork
• Steak Milanesa
• Chicken Naranja
• Chicken Dijon
• Barbequed Chicken Sandwiches
• Mini Cheese Meatloaves
• Gnocchi with Turkey Ragu
• Poppyseed Chicken
• "Craig & Debbie's Easy Fixins" - which I call "Hamburger Salsa Skillet"

I omitted two of the recipes from this two-week cycle: Chicken Italiano, because it contains spinach, to which Levi is allergic, and Tilapia Filets because neither Levi nor I eat fish.

STEP 1: Clear your work space of any extraneous decor or appliances. Assemble your ingredients. (Milk, cheese, meats, etc. are still in the fridge until needed)...Check!

A couple notes on this step: first, since I have the Kindle edition of the cookbook but no Kindle, that's my laptop screen on the right (one nice thing about having the book digitally is that I was able to blow up the font size to make it easy to read from several feet away). Second, I pre-measured the flour, sugar, etc. - anything normally kept in a large, bulky container, so that I didn't have THAT taking up precious counter space as well.

STEP 2: Start chopping! As I mentioned, the book guides you neatly through all the steps in assembly-line fashion, so first I chopped all the onions I would need for all the recipes, then the peppers, the celery, etc. Then, when you start cooking/assembling, the recipes indicate measurements instead of quanties, i.e. one cup of onion rather than 1 onion.

Here are all my veggies! Aren't they pretty?

Oh, and you see this?
That is an entire fruit's worth of freshly grated lemon zest. It took me 20 minutes, at least, because I didn't have the proper tool and had to make do with the extra-fine side of an ordinary grater. And...after I had prepped and stored all 12 of my entrees, it was still sitting there. I *freaked* and started frantically searching through my recipes to figure out how I had missed it, only to discover...it was for the Tilapia. That I didn't make. D'oh!

Anyway! Once the veggies are all prepped, you start in on the meats. Which, in this case, mostly meant dividing and cutting up a million raw chicken breasts. Some you cube, some you cut into strips, a few just needed to be halved. I hate handling raw chicken anyway, so this was definitely my least favorite part of the process. Bleah. BUT, I got through it, and moved on to step 3...assembly! (The process up to this point has taken me about 4 hours. I think I spent about an hour just on the chicken.)

STEP 3: Cook/assemble/freeze. If I recall correctly, the meals were assembled pretty much in the order listed above. The spaghetti sauce had to simmer for a while, so my first completed meal was the Orecchiette with Tuna (side note: orecchiette is a fancy shaped pasta that, at my local grocery store, cost 3X as much as the box of store-brand mini shells. Guess which I bought?). For this dish, I had to heat some sauce, veggies and the tuna in a smallish saucepan, then transfer the cooked dish to a quart-size freezer bag. There is apparently a learning curve to pouring stuff out of a pan, into a plastic bag, because I made a MESS. Sauce *everywhere!* It's okay, though, I was able to scrape most of it off the counter and into the bag anyway.

Just kidding.

Anyway, once I got the tuna debacle cleaned up, the rest of the meals came together pretty smoothly. Any entree that was designated as serving more than 4, I split and froze as two meals, which in the end gave me not 12, but 20 entrees! Here's my freezer at about the halfway point:

8 entrees, 14 meals. 4 entrees/6 meals to go!

All told, I worked from about 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. made it through 10 of the 12 meals, and finished up the last two the next night after the kids went to bed. Whew!!

Kitchen Experiment: Part 1

(Two cooking-related posts in a row?!)

Levi and I (and the kids, by default) are trying a kitchen experiment.

Levi and I are not very imaginative when it comes to menu planning - our weekly table tends to be spaghetti, pizza, mac n cheese, parmesan chicken, spaghetti... - and invariably when I've been motivated to change things up, I fail to have the proper ingredients on hand and either have to run to the store in the middle of cooking, or, more likely, slam cupboards in frustration and run to McDonalds.

So, after doing some reading online, we (I) decided to give "once a month cooking" (OAMC) a try. The basic concept being, you prep a bunch of dinners all at once and stick them in the freezer, so that all you have to do is reheat on the stove, or pop it in the oven/slowcooker/on the grill.

After reviewing MANY OAMC books on Amazon, I purchased Once A Month Cooking: Family Favorites (Kindle edition, $10!).


This book is great for OAMC newbies because it does all the thinking for you - you just pick a 2- or 4-week "menu cycle" and it gives you a complete shopping list, recipes and assembly line-style preparation instructions. A lot of the other books are more focused on helping you save money shopping by building your own menu around your grocery store's sales, but I didn't feel like doing that much work. I wanted this to be SIMPLE.

(One of the other reasons I picked this particular book is because ALL of the Menu Cycles were available for free download on their website, www.once-a-monthcooking.com. I knew that I was going to be cooking stuff that my family would actually eat - or at least try!)

Serendipitously, around the first of this month our cupboards were looking pretty bare and we were due for a major shopping trip anyway, so I decided on a menu cycle, cross-checked the pantry and shopping lists against what we actually had on hand, added the miscellaneous household stuff that we always needed (cereal, milk, diapers, etc.), and headed out shopping.

The total bill for "Two Week Cycle D" came to just over $130 - at a projected 72 "servings" (the recipes ranged from 4 to 20(!) servings per dish), the per-serving cost was under $2. I've never paid THAT much attention to how much it costs to cook for my family, but that sounds pretty good to me.

Next up (with pictures, finally!) - Part 2: OAMC Meal Prep Day.