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The George Foreman panini maker

Posted in Eats, Family, Home, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 3, 2011| 2 Comments »

In cooking, imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery. I love it when someone else tries to replicate one of my dishes. I love it even more when that someone is my mother.

The husband and I have owned a George Foreman Grill for the better part of our marriage. (Actually, we’re on our second grill. The cats broke the first one about 10 years ago.) We used to cook burgers on it; its sole use lately has been to sear the occasional hot dog.

Last year, I saw a couple of comments on food blogs recommending the Foreman Grill as a fast, cheap panini maker. It makes sense: The device is, after all, simply two heavy sheets of metal that press together.

I made grilled cheese sandwiches with it. Blah. The only bread I tend to keep around is some brand or another of wheat bread, the kind that doesn’t go bad in four days since I don’t actually EAT bread every day, and the husband tends to like a PB&J on the weekends. It didn’t grill very well, Foreman Grill or not, partially because it didn’t really fit on the grill (it’s a smaller model).

Enter Earth Fare. Heading to the checkout one day, I saw a display of bread that stopped me in my tracks, bread that looked like it had been freshly made just to fit on the Foreman Grill.

I made an experimental sandwich when I got home, smearing honey mustard on two slices and bundling a small bundle of ham and cheese in between. Best panini ever.

When Mom was here for Christmas, the only kind of bread Earth Fare had left was two loaves speckled with pieces of olives. Best panini ever. (And I realize I have to stop saying that or my credibility is going to be shot.)

For lunch today, I grilled the last two pieces with a couple of slices of Havarti from Costco. Perfection.

More perfection: Mom texted me yesterday to let me know she had switched the plates out on her waffle maker to make sandwiches like mine. Ingenious.

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Post a day? We’ll see.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on January 3, 2011| 2 Comments »

What the heck. I’m going to try the WordPress Post a Day 2011 challenge. After all, if the extremely busy Calluna is up for the challenge, then surely I can sit down for a few minutes every day to write something.

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Happy Random Day!

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on November 30, 2010| 1 Comment »

Let’s face it: Thanksgiving is entirely too close to Christmas. It amazes me that people put so much effort into Thanksgiving, flying across the country or driving across the state, only to do it again four weeks later.

Having moved a good eight hours away from my mom and the in-laws, I’ve discovered that I just can’t do it anymore. There will be visits, but they will not necessarily occur on Thanksgiving Day or Christmas Day — I’ve moved past obsessing over dates. I’ll be just as thankful to have dinner with my family on any random day as I would on the official holidays. Happier, really, seeing as how I will likely have skipped the pre-holiday epic traffic jam that is Birmingham, Alabama.

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What Halloween memories?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on November 9, 2010| 2 Comments »

My prime trick-or-treating years should have been the late ’70s, but thanks to overblown rumors of poisoned Halloween candy, it was a bust. My brother and I would don our costumes and go to maybe three houses, all people my parents knew. No roaming around knocking on door after door, retrieving the great variety of treats that I imagined other kids were enjoying – after the candy was x-rayed, of course.

Oddly, we were given the run of the neighborhood the rest of the year. We could disappear for a couple of hours at a time without too much worry on my mom’s part. If we were on my grandparents’ farm, we might be out of sight for the entire day, popping in only for meals and snacks.

So I’m not sure how today’s children, protected from every bump and bruise, both to their bodies and self-esteem, are allowed to waltz around neighborhoods (sometimes not even the neighborhoods they live in) and TAKE CANDY FROM STRANGERS.

Seriously. Kids aren’t trusted to walk 25 yards to the bus stop unescorted, but Halloween goes on?

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One roast, many different meals

Posted in Eats, Photographs, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 8, 2010| Leave a Comment »

I love it when a plan comes together. Or, more specifically, when a half-baked idea actually works.

One of my go-to slow cooker dishes is Pepperoncini Beef, which is pretty much a 2- to 3-pound beef chuck roast stuffed with a few cloves of slivered garlic, topped with a 16-ounce jar of pepperoncini and simmered on low for eight hours. We make roast beef and pepperoncini sandwiches on sub bread; topped with cheese and baked in the toaster oven for about three minutes, these are more than mere sandwiches.

Problem: 2 to 3 pounds of roast beef leaves us with WAY more leftovers than we can possibly stand to eat in one week, and it doesn’t freeze well.

Yesterday, while filling the grocery list with ingredients for another slow cooker recipe, I found the solution. Household fave Cowboy Stew, from the Year of Slow Cooking blog, calls for a pound of browned hamburger meat.

In the end, what’s the difference between a pound of ground beef and a similar amount of shredded roast beef once you mix it all up together and cook it for eight hours?

It was delicious, plus it saved me nearly $5 and the guilt of tossing out perfectly edible food. Kitchen WIN!

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KENNY! tees land in practical joke hall of fame

Posted in Photographs, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on October 4, 2010| Leave a Comment »

I don’t know who impresses me more: Kenny, the guy who had his portrait taken with a Jack Russell terrier clad in a T-shirt, as if he somehow knew that a website featuring hilarious photos of people and their pets would make its mark on the Internet in several years, or Les, the guy behind an epic practical joke involving this portrait of a man and his well-dressed dog.

It’s close, but I’m going to have to go with Les.

Several years ago, Les spotted this photograph on Kenny’s refrigerator. Knowing that, like revenge, mockery is a dish best served cold, Les swiped the photo two years ago and hung it up in his garage. Neither Kenny nor his wife noticed it hanging there, apparently. For two years.

This weekend, Kenny found himself at a party surrounded by more than 20 friends wearing T-shirts emblazoned with this image:

This is an exceptional practical joke for two reasons:

  1. Les was able to hold on to the purloined photograph for two whole years without giving himself away. This requires an almost unimaginable amount of patience.
  2. The party where the surprise T-shirts made their debut wasn’t even for Kenny. It was a welcome-home party for one of his friends returning from a four-month tour of duty in Kuwait. Luckily, the celebration also acknowledged Kenny’s wife’s birthday, and she was the surprised recipient of the first T-shirt.

Kenny's the one in the middle, not wearing a KENNY! shirt.

Les is an evil genius. Most of us will never see a successful practical joke so epic and well-planned. Several of us do have a KENNY! T-shirt that is a great reminder that such possibilities exist, however.

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The glue gun may have won the battle, but I won the war. At least this one.

Posted in Crafts, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on September 30, 2010| 3 Comments »

I finished a crafting project and only blistered one finger with the glue gun! This is epic, you guys.

My mom brought me several of my late grandmother’s pins earlier this summer. I have my doubts that my grandmother actually ever wore most of these pins, as they lean toward the sparkly and the offbeat, while my grandmother leaned in the opposite direction.

Still, they were hers. Or, at least, they were given to her and she kept them for a long time and now they’re mine.

I’ve gotten tired lately of hiding my treasures in boxes. Fun jewelry deserves a fun display. One day in early August, I was walking through my favorite thrift store, A New Leash on Life Marketplace, and while I was digging through a box of old, beat-up frames, it hit me: 3D pin frames. My husband would later call this wondrous idea a “pin cushion.”

I purchased a few of the smaller frames and went to work. First, the frames had to be painted, because I do not get along with gold and bronze accessories. Black seemed like the color to best offset bright silver jewelry. I had fun with a wooden frame that features highly stylized scrollwork, layering red, then silver, then black for a unique finish.

Before: blah.

The hard part was next. I bought your garden-variety pillow stuffing and some black cloth. I glued three edges of the cloth to the little piece of cardboard that goes between the frame and the glass, stuffed it with stuffing until it reached my visualized shape and glued the fourth side down. Finally, I crammed the cushion into the frame opening.

It took more maneuvering to get the pins into the cushions than I had imagined, and I had to thread a tiny piece of invisible thread around the tops of the pins to keep them from tilting forward, but overall I’m calling it a successful project. Glue gun injuries aside.

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On the rocks

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on September 24, 2010| 2 Comments »

I always wanted a rock tumbler when I was a kid. I eyed the same one every year when the JCPenney catalog arrived, picturing myself polishing rock after shiny rock.

I was a bit obsessive, even as a child. Our driveway would have simply gleamed with polished rocks.

I saw a tumbler on the shelf at Michael’s today. It hit me that now that I have enough money to buy myself a rock tumbler, I don’t have any rocks.

So goes adulthood.

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Rings in the drawer, pants on the ground

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 9, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Yesterday, I discovered that I can no longer safely wear my wedding rings. Four weeks of stress has led to weight loss, and my fingers are too skinny. I haven’t seen this weight since I had a tonsillectomy at age 20.

Lucky me, I guess, except I hate shopping for clothes and don’t want to get these rings resized.

It’s not that much weight, mind you. Just enough that pants fall a little farther than they should on my hips and the rings slip right off my finger. Not that they’ve ever wanted to stay on my finger. I’m forever finding myself in the car, halfway to a destination, with the realization that the rings are back at home in the knife drawer. My ring finger, apparently, longs to be free of the bonds of matrimony, even if my heart does not.

Now that I’ve gotten used to tiny portions, my body doesn’t want much more. Add to that the fact that I work at home by myself and consider eating more of a social activity than a physical necessity, and you’ll see that I have my work cut out for me.

The journey back to ring-wearing starts today: I’m having lunch with a friend. Tomorrow, perhaps, I’ll work on getting my pants off the ground.

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As Pictured Below: Go and get yourself some cheap sunglasses

Posted in Photographs, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on July 10, 2010| 2 Comments »

Fine. I’m rough on sunglasses. I drop them, lose them and leave them on the edge of the kitchen counter, allowing cats to do gravity experiments on them.

My go-to plan for sunglasses has always been to simply keep a couple of cheap pairs lying around. My husband, who has had the same unharmed expensive sunglasses for more than five years, encouraged me to buy a nicer pair last year. Meaning a pair that cost more than (gasp) $30.

True to form, I dropped them, lost them and left them on the edge of the counter.

Some things you accept about yourself. Me, I’ve accepted that I go through a couple of $10 shades from Target every year. Really, there are worse personality traits.

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