If You Ask Me…
This is the funniest picture ever.
This was the best snack of the week.
Apple slices, peanut butter, granola and chocolate chips.
The grocery store is the last place I want to go for the rest of the week.
One trip Friday night and two trips on Saturday for party food and one trip today for food for the rest of the week. I think I’ve seen enough of the grocery store for a while.
I need all of this for Valentine’s Day.
I swear it took 15 minutes to make my sandwich at the Whole Foods deli and that pile of chocolate and candy was looking better and better by the minute.
I was hungry.
Whole Foods is kind of overrated.
Don’t get me wrong, I love what Whole Foods is all about, but sometimes when I grab a quick lunch there I feel like I’m paying a lot for food that isn’t that good. And for the record, that baguette destroyed my mouth.
Fancy jello shots are a party necessity.
And they need to follow the party theme. Which was 3 hours of expensive commercials, right? I don’t recall watching any football yesterday.
Good thing the Patriots and the Giants have the same team colors, jello gets expensive. Oh wait, it doesn’t.
And I won’t lie, this recipe was a little confusing and Joey had to rush to the store for more gelatin, but in the end it was worth it — everyone loved them!
Football is ….
Sorry but the whole football thing is kind of lost on me. I don’t quite understand it and I’m fairly sure I don’t want to try. I’m in it for the jello shots (see above).
The pizza I made was the best looking one at our Super Bowl party yesterday.
Want proof?
Foodie football art? Yes please!
Madonna put on a great half time show.
Okay, say what you will about her, but everyone at our party seemed pretty entertained. I thought her song selection was awesome and I was so excited when she shuffled with LMFAO.
Just because it’s the Super Bowl and you’ll probably consume mass amounts of chips, dip, pizza, guacamole and may or may not take the bowl of puppy chow home with you when you leave the party, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still celebrate Pancake Sunday.
Peanut butter pancakes, oh yes.
The commercials were pretty good.
Except that I only heard a few because our party was male dominated and they didn’t seem to care about the commercials so they talked over most of them. Unless, of course, there was a hot woman in the commercial, then they all shut right up. Typical.
Being left with a bunch of empty bowls and plates at the end of the night means it was a successful party.
Everything, from the mini corn bread muffins to the puppy chow turned out great!
Overall, it was a great weekend. Here’s to a productive week!
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Did you watch the Super Bowl?
What was your favorite commercial?
What’s your favorite party snack?
Spaghetti and Meatballs
I’m having a change of heart in relation to meat eating lately. I’ve found that the longer I keep my Google Reader closed, stop analyzing what other people are eating and focus on what my body is craving, the more I find myself wanting burgers, Chipotle steak bowls and meatballs.
I’m not about to go all caveman on you, and I would still rather eat a veggie dog than a real one, but I’m coming to realize that you don’t have to approach anything with an all or nothing attitude, meat included. So what if I’m craving some good quality steak (good quality being the key words here)? I think there’s definitely a way to appease both my desire to eat ethically and my need to eat deliciously. And call me crazy but I’m pretty sure that if you look up the word “delicious” in the dictionary, you’ll see a picture of a giant burger, heavily doused in cheese and ketchup.
Notice how my meat preferences lean towards beef products. That’s because I have and probably always will think chicken and turkey suck. You can find pictures of those two under “boring,” “dry,” and “bland.” Which is why when I bought a “vegetarian” empanada at Whole Foods last week and found myself eating chicken, I was not happy, to say the least.
Let’s be very clear that I’ve never been a vegetarian. I refuse to ever give up shrimp and I would ask someone to commit me if I ever said no to my mom’s sausage and ham-filled red beans and rice. Plus I always feel obligated to at least see if someone has finally figured out the answer to the age old question, “How do I make this turkey not dry?” every Thanksgiving.
This week I asked Joey to “name 5 things he would have us cook, if price and meat were not a consideration.” I won’t even tell you what my response was when he yelled “KRAFT MAC AND CHEESE!” After additional prompting, he finally responded with “spaghetti and meatballs!” Now that’s more like it.
We made the Pioneer Woman’s classic spaghetti and meatballs recipe on Tuesday night and it was everything I had imagined. This isn’t about meat eating or not, there’s something honestly comforting about a big warm bowl of saucy pasta. Especially if there’s also garlic bread and a glass of wine.
10 Things That May Surprise You
1. It’s still winter.
I keep hoping on days like yesterday (when it was upper 50’s and I was trouncing around in short sleeves… okay, it was three-quarter sleeves, but still!) that we’ll just be done with cold weather, but the fact that it snowed not once, but twice last week is a harsh harsh reminder that it’s still very much winter.
2. It’s perfectly normal to have two laptops open and be working on them at the same time.
I kind of give up on thinking writing a post will be a simple process. I keep jumping between computers, one that has Windows Live Writer on it and the other that moves about 100% faster and makes uploading pictures from my phone so easy. And by easy, I mean they just wind up there without me lifting a finger.
3. I don’t actually like alcohol.
I just like things that taste like juice and make me feel like dancing.
Case in point, Riesling — and not just any Riesling, it has to be sweet Riesling — is my favorite wine.
4. When you’re having a bad day, a Chipotle lunch break will always make you feel better.
I could pretend writing a resume when you have little work experience and applying for dozens of jobs and barely hearing back isn’t discouraging, but I like to keep it real on the blog. It’s pretty exhausting. So I went to lunch, got what I was craving (a steak bowl!) and felt re-energized. Or just full. Same thing, right?
5. How many times in one week can someone eat fish? At least 3!
I very rarely cook fish, but we made tilapia this week, I ate leftovers yesterday and we went out to Bonefish on Saturday. Guys, how good is Bang Bang Shrimp?!
6. Saturday can sometimes feel like the longest.day.ever.
If you don’t have a job, spent all week “hanging out,” and can’t exactly afford to o spend money all day, Saturday can be pretty boring. I won’t even tell you how much TV I watched.
7. Roasting your own almonds is totally easy.
Why do almonds only come in roasted and salted or raw? I don’t want to have to make a separate trip to Whole Foods just to get roasted and unsalted. Solution: buy raw and roast them yourself! Ten minutes at 350*, cool for an hour and you’re good to go.
8. There are just some things you’ll never understand.
Things I’ll never understand:
• Why Footloose is a classic. I was so bored. Is that bad?
• How I manage to let milk boil over every.single.time. I cook with it.
• How many groceries I can buy while staying within my budget. I need to stop worrying already!
• What “bearded barley” is!
9. Arthur is, in fact, an aardvark.
Apparently this is common knowledge and I now know exactly how to spell aardvark, thanks to this lovely video.
10. Sunday is the best.
If Saturday was a long, slow uneventful day, Sunday was the exact opposite. Run with Joey, Starbucks, grocery, yoga, homemade dinner. Oh, and did I mention our new Sunday morning pancake ritual? It totally reminds me of when I was little and my mom would make pancakes that we would use cookie cutters to shape into a bear and a pig, or used food coloring to make blue or green pancakes.
Aaaand, now I have a “Pancakes!” board on Pinterest for future “Pancake Sundays.”
Lauren Loves Good Food 