Hey, moving time!

It's been a long time.

It's not just that my schedule keeps me away at dinnertime. It's that I got too far outside the original theme of this blog.

So I've decided to expand a bit. With that in mind, I'm moving over to Time to Nom, where I'll blog about anything and everything about enjoying and exploring food--healthier eating, cheap eats, interesting new products, dinner on those long days....

It's kind of sad to leave this blog behind, but by expanding the scope of what I write about, I'll be able to make regular updates again without getting off-topic. I guess that's not a sad thing at all. :)

I successfully ignored my kitchen for... well. Quite some time.

Part of it was the mini-vacation to Ohio, during which I ignored anything like health and good taste. Seriously--there's nothing to eat on road trips. Once you get beyond where Sheetz and WaWa are every hundred miles or so on the highway, there's nothing left but fast food. Which, arguably, is not food at all.

So I returned home to a filthy kitchen. I don't generally like to leave my place a mess when I leave for a few days--travel is tiring enough without coming back to a kitchen that looks like the Great Powdered Sugar Blizzard of '08 had blown through--but, well, it was Christmas. I hadn't had time to do anything but bake, visit family, bake more, visit more family, do last-minute laundry, pack, sleep, cram the cat into a carrier and leave smoking treadmarks behind me.

I came home, as I said, to a thick layer of powdered sugar, nuts and calcified God-knows-what.

It's better now. Three weeks later, I'd sure hope so.

And now--just to make things more interesting--I need to severely restrict saturated fat in the things I cook. That means the tacos I made last night? The ones with no cheese? Nasty.

You can't mess up potato wedges, though, and those will make an appearance here very, very soon. As in, next week.

So will the sweet-and-spicy chicken with peppers and onions that I'm fixing for dinner tomorrow night.

So is a heavier focus on lunch, because my schedule for the spring has me working or in class at dinnertime most nights.

Sigh. I wish I'd taken pictures of the greasy, deliciously dive fare sausage I had while on vacation. I just, y'know, didn't want to start snapping photos in the middle of a nearly empty dive bar. But trust me, it left a puddle and tasted like the most wonderful heart attack you could ever have.

Cooooookieeeeeee, omnomnomnomnom!

O noez! I just realized that I need to get started on baking Xmas cookies if I want to mail them in time!

As soon as I'm done getting spanked by Monday's American Foreign Policy exam, it's time to start baking! Oh, and shopping for cute little cookie tins!

Although I wonder if I shouldn't sit on the coookie package posts until after Xmas, just in case the relatives who will be getting yummy goodies are reading this....

Uh-oh, leftovers!

It wouldn't be a holiday dinner if The Mr. and I didn't come home with an armload of leftovers.

This Thanksgiving haul: One spiced pumpkin pie, one plastic takeaway container of green bean casserole and one ham.

No, I don't mean one takeaway container of ham. We have one whole honey roasted ham. I believe it came from the HoneyBakedHam Company.

What the [stuff] am I gonna do with all that ham?! They told me it would freeze well, but why don't you try freezing half a ham with the bone still in it! All right, then, Option B: Eat it all before it spoils.

So, dinner last night was ham and cheddar sandwiches on whole wheat baguette (courtesy of my sister, who works at Panera and gets a massive discount). My pre-workout breakfast this morning was a ham and cheddar omelet with two eggs and one egg white.

I wanted to make ham bowls--put slices in the bottom of a muffin tin and fill the cup--but the bone gets in the way of pulling off a decently sized slice.

I'm thinking dinner tonight will be baked mac 'n cheese with ham, peppers and onions.

'Scuze me, I need to go Google, "What do I do with all this ham?!"

Turbaconducken

We've all heard of Turducken.

Well, now there's Turbaconducken.

This is easily the most disgusting thing I have ever seen on the Internet. And I've seen a lot of disgusting things on the Internet.

Really. How could anybody eat this?

I admit that I'm a reluctant carnivore and I will only eat good meat, but this is--wow. I can't imagine eating this!

Chili Beer Burritos

I made beer burritos with chili beer last night.

Ew.

I knew they were going to taste different when I used frozen corn and fresh tomatoes instead of canned, to cut back on the sodium.

What I didn't expect was no flavor at all from the beer.

I usually make beer burritos with Corona, and it comes out just fine. The chili beer didn't leave behind any beer flavor or extra spice. I was expecting at least some heat, considering how burny the beer is when I drink it from the bottle.

Nope. Nothing. Disappointing, because when I make it with Corona, I get comments on how nice the beer flavor is. Oh well.

The next order of business? Satisfy my curiosity about what the chili itself--a regular ol' serrano pepper--tastes like. I shook it out of the bottle and lopped off a piece to taste. I immediately wished I hadn't. Maybe all of the spice had leached out into the beer? I don't know how those things work.

The short attention span version: Chili beer doesn't give food flavor. Eating chilis that have been soaked in beer is a bad idea. Do Not Try This At Home Or At All.

Pasta, as promised

Well, I said I'd post about the pasta, so here it is!

The sauce is intense. I mean, it is HOT. It will make you breathe fire.
But, man, is it worth it.

I tossed it with gnocchi first, which...whatever, it was Target gnocchi. Nothing special there. The Mr. enjoyed it, but I thought it was too blah. I don't think it's even worth discussing.

The fettuccine, on the other hand.... yum! I'm not sure where I got it, but I have a vague memory of my mom giving it to me. It was Al Dente Lemon & Chive Fettuccine. The lemon chive flavor was annihilated by the fiery sauce, so next time I'll make up a garlic butter sauce.

Aside from being superheated, the fettuccine was deliciously sweet and hot. Unlike a lot of pasta I've eaten, which exists mainly to hold up the sauce, I could taste the noodle. Like I said, I couldn't really taste any lemon chive, but there was a distinct noodle flavor. The sauce has just enough oil in it. It does a great job of de-stickifying the noodles, but I didn't get that feeling like I'd just chugged a bottle of olive oil.

This goes on my Must Have Again list. I'm starting to think that it might be worth getting in my car and driving 20 minutes each way.

Tonight, I'm making burritos with chili beer!