This was *hiccup* the easiest *hiccup* pot roast *hiccup* ever.  

If you didn’t know this tidbit of information, the acidity of wine helps tenderize meat, which is why it’s so often used in marinades.  Chemistry can be useful.  It also helps tenderize humans, at least temporarily. 

Ingredients: 

• 1 lean chuck roast (3-4lbs)  Of course we used the 4 pounder.  
• Salt and Pepper
• 3 Tbsp of flour
• 2 Tbsp of olive oil
• 1 medium sweet onion, coarsely chopped
• 1 can of diced tomatoes
• 1/2 cup of red, red wine
• 2 Tbsp of red wine vinegar
• 3 cloves of garlic, CRUSHED by the press.  It’s the only way.  

This, is where the flavor is at.  This is the big show.  har har.  

• Rub the roast in flour, salt, and pepper.  
• Brown on all sides in a frying pan.  

• The pan will be messy.  See above figure for reference.  

• Transfer your small chuck round baby to the crockpot.  He may take a few minutes to adjust to his new home, but make him understand, he has to go new places to grow.  

• Leave all that browned gristle in the pan, and throw in your roughly chopped onions.  By roughly chopped I don’t mean hurt yourself.  

On a tangent, this was the biggest clove of garlic I’ve ever, ever seen.  I haven’t even heard tales of pieces of garlic this large.  It would’ve won first prize at the county fair for sure.  

• After the onions have browned a bit, add the garlic, canned, diced tomatoes, red wine, and red wine vinegar.  In this step I was tempted to keep adding things as per usual, but I relinquished the desire.  I decided to stick to the recipe this time.  

• Stir the mixture of medium high heat until it’s simmering and bubbling like a cheerful witch’s brew.  

• Throw it all into the pot, and let the simmering sauce bond with the browned meat.  Don’t be afraid to introduce them, their love is powerful, and combined, they will make beautiful music.  
• Put the crockpot on High for 1 hour.  Then complete one of the two following options.  
• Reduce heat to Low, and let it cook for 8 to 10 hours
• Or, leave it on High, and cook it for 4 to 5 hours.  
• If at any point, it’s looking dry and crusty, slowly add some water, or more wine. I added a cup of water in the cooking process, and about half a cup more of wine.  

Here’s the beautiful result.  It was fragrant, it was rich, it was filling, and it satisfied my inner desire for red meat.  

Discovering the crockpot has proved very beneficial to my life.  I’m relatively certain that the use of it will revolutionize our dinner life.  I could compare it to the American Revolution, and the crockpot is liberating me from hours in the kitchen like the war liberated the Americans from Britain.  But I won’t go that far.  

In other news, how awesome are these pig snout mugs?  We didn’t realize what they were until we were halfway done drinking the coffee, and then we enjoyed the heck out of them.  I halfway wonder if the good people at Hullabaloo’s designed these to insinuate something about their customers.  

This was a Mexican-Italian fusion of a meal.  I like to think of a large man that looks like Mario from super nintendo, wearing a sombrero and singing That’s Amore simultaneously.  

I have dubbed them racy because I added a lot of spicy things to these meatballs.  I do this, not because I can’t think of better flavors, but because I like my meal to end in tears and clear sinuses.  The beast likes it even more than I do.  

One time, we went to a restaurant in Hot Springs, Arkansas called La Hacienda.  This little family owned Mexican restaurant basically ruins all other Mexican food for me.  There refried beans were homemade and fresh, their fajitas were a delicacy, and their green salsa was so spicy I tasted it for 3 days.  As I, completely unaware of the level of spiciness in this green concoction, loaded my tortilla chip full of the salsa, I was watched with several pairs of eager eyes, waiting to watch me scream and run to the bathroom.  

It was only funny if you weren’t the one whose taste buds were completely obliterated.

But these weren’t that spicy.  They were in the happy land between “zippy” and “painful.” 

Ingredients: 

• 1/2 cup of oatmeal
• 2 lbs of ground sirloin
• 1 onion
• 1 small can of green chiles
• pickled jalapenos (as many as your precious heart wants)
• 1 tsp of salt
• 1 egg
• pepper
• olive oil
• chili powder 
• The optional addition of marinara sauce, or canned, crushed tomatoes

• Simmer your onions with olive oil until they’re soft and a little brown.  

• Meanwhile, put your meat, eggs, oatmeal, green chilies, chili powder, jalapenos, salt, and pepper into a bowl.  

• Then, add your pretty caramelized onions. 
• Mold them into beautiful meatballs, using your hands of course.  If society won’t let me play in the mud as an adult, then I’m going to do it with raw meat.  

• Put them in a roasting pan lined with foil, unless you like scraping meat fall off the bottom of your pans.  
• Bake at 375 for about 15 minutes.  Check them often, because depending on the size of your meatball it may not take that long.  

• If you want a topping, put some marinara sauce or crushed tomatoes on top of the meatballs, and stick them back in the oven for 5 minutes or so to get it all warm and bubbly.  
• Repeat the word Bubbly ten times.  That’ll make you happy if you aren’t already. 

And here they are!  This recipe took me a grand total of 5 minutes not counting cook time.  I read some statistic that on average, people in the U.S. only cook for 30 minutes a day on average while in other countries, they cook somewhere between 70 and 90 minutes a day.  Either we’re lazy or we have cooler kitchen tools. 

I served mine with brussell sprouts instead of pasta, mainly because I’ve been cooking a lot of bad things recently, purely on accident, and I’m trying to turn that around.  Fatty McLovehandles here I come. 

And if you haven’t already seen one of the 80 pictures I’ve posted of my new nephew, here he is.  Gabriel Kai Works, born innocent, voted most likely to be spoiled rotten.  

Ah, the old maritime favorite.  The English pub staple.  The outback’s choice for take-away.  And my choice for a Monday night right before playing soccer (that might not have been my grandest idea).  

In the late 1800’s, fish and chips became popular for the working class in Britain due to a recent increase in Trawl fishing in the North Sea.  In Ireland, a popular way to ask for fish n’ chips is “one and one,” a phrase made popular by a street vendor who sold the goods named Giuseppi Cervi, an Italian immigrant who would ask “Uno di questa, uno di quella?” (one of this, one of that?)

You learn something everyday.  The only problem with fish and chips is that you’re basically eating a dead sea creature covered in lard and salt, and fried potatoes covered in salt and ketchup, vinegar, tartar sauce, or whatever those Brits do.  Apparently a popular accompaniment to the dish is something called “mushy peas.”  Doesn’t that sound delightful.  

So, we did it the healthy way, as healthy as breaded anything can get I suppose, and it was delicious anyway.  It made me feel like I was on the coast of Ireland, having a beer with a red-headed woman named Catherine.  

Ingredients: 

• Olive oil or canola oil
• 1 and 1/2 pounds of sweet potatoes 
• Cajun seasoning (Tony’s is a classic choice here, but we’ve just discovered a lesser known cajun seasoning that rocks our socks off, courtesy of Brittany, our live-in guest for the past two weeks)
• 2 cups of corn flakes
• 1/4 cup of wheat flour 
• 1/4 tsp of salt
• 4 egg whites (you may need more, I think we ended up increasing the dosage)
• 1 pound of fish.  Traditional choices are cod and haddock if you want to go all British on the family, but we had Tilapia in our freezer so that’s what we used.  We’re all about convenience.  

And here’s my dear Brittany, or as I call her, the cornflake crusher.  We tried doing it in the magic bullet but that ground them too fine, so we ended up just smashing them in a plastic bag which yielded beautiful results.  The magic bullet was a little too magical. 

• Separate your ingredients into three bowls as follows: 
• Put your crushed cornflakes into one bowl
• Put your egg whites into another bowl
• Put your flour, cajun seasoning, and salt in another shallow bowl.  Feel free to improvise with the spices, it makes it taste so much better. 

• If you have a pretty assistant, now is the time to use her. 
• Brittany took each fish filet and put it in the flour mixture first, then in the egg wash, then coated each with the crushed corn flakes.  She also has beautifully painted red fingernails. 

• And here is the fish being coated in corn flakes.  It’s kind of ironic because it looks like scales.  What you once lose may soon return to you….

• Place the fish in a baking pan covered in foil, and bake at 425 for about 20 minutes, until your flakes are crispy.  

• And here they are!  Ta da! But something is missing.  Where is fish’s best friend? 

Oh HERE they are!  The chips!  

• These are easy.  I cut sweet potatoes into a fry-like shape, you can do yours in the shape of dinosaurs if you feel so inclined.  
• Coat with cooking spray
• Cover with cajun seasonings
• Bake with the fish, but these take about 35 to 40 minutes, so put them in first!  

These are really delicious all the time.  They basically taste bad for you, but they’re NOT.  A sweet potato is one of the best complex carbohydrates you can get.  So thank you to the yam family! 

Nutrition data for these goodies:

Per serving: 325 calories; 5 g fat ( 0 g sat , 3 g mono ); 43 mg cholesterol; 45 g carbohydrates; 0 g added sugars; 24 g protein; 3 g fiber; 331 mg sodium; 955 mg potassium

The lesson to be learned:  Don’t batter your fish.  It’ll hurt their feelings.  BAKE!  

Happy beautiful fall day everyone.  I’m sitting on our porch in this weather, probably the first day below 100 degrees in ages.  

Read more …

Pumpkin has again reared it’s beautiful, powerful, spiced head in our home.  

I’m contemplating buying pumpkin T-shirts instead of just wearing an orange blanket with a stem hat all the time, and if you’d like to see similar T-shirts for your own wearing pleasure, go here: http://www.zazzle.com/pumpkin+lover+gifts

That was a nice plug for zazzle.com.  

I made this delicious recipe for my delicious beast, at his request.  I think he’s in on my pumpkin obsession, because I got an email containing this recipe while he was at work a few weeks ago.  

Ingredients: 

•½ C Xylitol Brown Sugar Blend (Splenda makes this!)
•4 oz of unsweetened applesauce
•2 tsp. ground cinnamon
•1 ½ tsp. ground ginger
•½ tsp. ground clove
•1 tsp. baking powder
•1 tsp. baking soda
•½ tsp. salt
•2 tsp. vanilla extract
•4 large egg whites
•1 - 15 oz. can of raw pumpkin
•2 C whole wheat flour
•2 scoops vanilla whey protein
•½ cup almond milk
•½ C chopped walnuts (optional)

The brown sugar blend is actually delicious.  

I may have eaten it plain.  But I would never admit that.  

Now mix together all but the last 4 ingredients in a large bowl.  Add the last 4 ingredients one at a time and stir until incorporated.  

• Now put your pretty orange-paste mixture in a 9x13 baking dish. 
• Bake at 350 for 30 minutes 

Now that it’s brown and your house smells like Charlie Brown’s after his mother cooked the Great Pumpkin, you should cut it into 24 squares. 

Now the second best part besides eating it: Each square only has 63 calories, 8g of carbs, and 4g of protein.  The problem with that is, I felt it perfectly acceptable to eat 4 of them.  It’s kind of like eating half the box of low fat wheat thins.  

All 24 of these were gone in approximately 2.4 days.  

Fall is coming!  

The most pleasant smell and taste of life.  Many a dessert has been named for it, many a child has decorated one in the throws of excitement round the holidays, and many a candle has been blessed to be infused with the essence of it’s spiced felicity.  The pumpkin shows it’s beautiful face my friends.

This is inspired by the up and coming appearance of the return of the Pumpkin Spice Latte.  I decided to make Pumpkin ( I capitalize to show respect ) muffins, and to do it as healthfully as possible.  They were thoroughly enjoyed by the beast, the beast’s family, and myself.  Just in case my love of pumpkin hasn’t made itself perfectly clear, my mother in law has nicknamed me P.G. ( Pumpkin Girl ).  

Ingredients: 

• 1 cup of canned pumpkin 
• 2 large eggs, beaten (don’t be getting those SMALL eggs) 
• 1/2 cup of buttermilk
• 1/2 cup of canola oil
• 3/4 cup of whole wheat flour
• 3/4 cup of all bran cereal (keep yourself regular!) 
• 3/4 cup of sugar
• 1 tsp of baking powder
• 1 tsp of baking soda
• 1 and 1/2 tsp of ground cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp of salt
• 1 cup of raisins or dried cranberries

• Mix all your dry ingredients together.  The bran looks a little gross…let’s just be honest.  
• Mix your wet ingredients (pumpkin, eggs, buttermilk, and oil)
• Now, mix them TOGETHER.  Then add the raisins/craisins.  I know craisins stands for cranberry-raisin, but I can’t help but think of it like a crazy raisin, which I like better honestly.  
• When these two things collide, it’s like the meeting of two soul mates.  The batter was delicious. 

• My mom gave me these cute little guys.  I think they were the proper adornments for this special guest, and this special occasion.  The Pumpkin muffin deserves a king’s garment.  Consider this cupcake sleeve the purple, velvet robe of the muffin. 
• Put your batter in a greased muffin tin, that is, if you don’t have an adorable cupcake sleeve.  
• Bake at 400 degrees for 18-20 minutes.  

• When they look like this, they’re done, and ready to be honored like they deserve to be honored.  

Pumpkin lovers unite.  Any time people who love pumpkin like I do come into the same room, there is an instant, undeniable chemistry.  If you love pumpkin, please feel free to share your favorite recipe.  I think the more pumpkin goodies we make, the faster fall will come.  Mother nature may feel pressured to perform if we start baking holiday scrumptious scrumpties.  

Speaking of fall, here are some inspiring photos to remind you of cooler days, and yummier food. 

BBQ CHICKEN AND BLUE CHEESE PIZZA!  

If you’re like my mother, and I’m approximating that about 43% of you are, you think pizza is meant to be covered in tomato sauce and cheese, and only things that compliment that flavor.  Well, like I told my dear, beautiful, and funny mother, you’re wrong and close-minded. Open your mind and your taste buds to the possibilities!  

We ate at this place called the Mellow Mushroom while we were in Destin, Florida this week at my aunt’s condo.  The place changed my perspective on the possibilities of pizza: pleasantly.  Alliteration never tasted quite so good.  

This pizza took me about 7 minutes to make, as long as it takes to cut up the veggies and throw it all on the pizza.  I did the math, and 7 minutes of work = 9 minutes of delectable taste bud joy, and 3 hours and 47 minutes of a belly that’s satisfied with what it ate.  I’m no mathematician, but the final sum seems quite to your advantage.  Plus, we had leftovers and got to do it all again the next day. 

Ingredients: 

• BBQ sauce, any kind will do.  I got the “thick and spicy” Kroger brand.  We do it big and expensive in the Works house.  
• 1.5 lbs of cooked chicken.  I just put my thawed chicken in the oven with some BBQ sauce, salt, pepper, and garlic in the oven for about 20 minutes.  After it’s cooked, shred it into smaller pieces so it can go on top of the pizza.  
• A ready-made pizza crust.  I like think crust because it’s crispier, and I really wanted to do whole wheat crust, but I did a homemade one once and Beast got sick that night and threw it up.  I don’t think it has anything to do with my crust (he was sick for a couple days, then I got sick, so I attribute it to the swine flu, the bird flu, or some horrible, undiscovered bacteria), but it didn’t seem prudent to make something he had previously barfed up.  
• A yellow bell pepper.  These little guys got expensive.  What the heck.  I almost didn’t buy him because he cost as much as a block of cheese, but the color quality of the pizza had to be honored.  
• Some cherry or grape tomatoes, halved
• 1/2 a red onion
• Blue cheese crumbles!  
• A scosche of mozzarella cheese for extra cheesiness.  Dangerously cheesy.  

• Spread your BBQ sauce of choice over the pizza.  It looks nice.  

• Add your pulled chicken to the duo.  The beast requires more protein, so I put lots of chicken on ours.  

• Now, add the vege.  Tomatoes, all cute and cut into little bits, the expensive yellow bell pepper, and the red onion.  

• Add the blue cheese crumblies and mozzarella cheese.  Add as much as you desire, I added about 1/2 a cup of blue cheese.  Chester the Cheetah would argue, the more, the better.  

• Bake at 500 degrees for about 10 minutes, until it looks all bubbly, delicious, and the crust is golden.  If the crust is black, you’ve gone too far. 

We ate this with relish.  Now the food relish, but we relished this pizza. It was so different from what we normally eat that it made me want to cry with delight.  I think I may have shed one tear.  But I love blue cheese.  If you don’t love it, try Feta, or just mozzarella if you want to please your boring taste buds.  But make some form of this, because it was a delight.  

Beast and I just got back from a family trip to Destin, Florida!  He and I have been before with friends, but this was his first time to stay at the family condo (not my family per se, but my Aunt and Uncle).  He got to experience all the joys of how we vacation in the Posey family, with lots of food, lots of naps, reading, and inventing sports (most recently, Quivel).  Here are my favorite beach pictures! 

These were inspired by a recent visit to Cracker Barrel.  Before you write Cracker Barrel off as a place for old people’s book club meetings or a hot date for a couple that’s been married for 50 years, hear me out.  Cracker Barrel is darn-tootin delicious.  The rocking chairs are delightful.  The old fashioned sweet shoppe makes me feel like I’m a child in the 30’s buying a moon pie or some rock candy.  And, to top it all off, they have these new granola pancakes that will rock your early morning socks off.  

So, being the inquisitive mind that I am, I decided one morning to decipher the secret formula of the most delicious granola pancakes I had ever eaten. They tasted wholesome, wheaty, and hearty.  And I hardly felt bad eating them because they were whole wheat.  Carbs aren’t really carbs unless it’s a hostess cake or animal parade cookie, then it’s bad.  

• 3/4 cup of whole wheat flour
• 3/4 cup of all purpose flour
• 1 Tbsp of brown shug (sugar) 
• 1 Tbsp of baking powder
• 1/2 tsp of baking soda 
• 1/4 tsp of salt
• 2 eggs ( I never understand when they differentiate between large and medium eggs, they all look about the same size to me.  But if it makes a difference, they say to use large eggs ) 
• 1 and 1/2 cups of buttermilk
• 3 Tbsp of melted margarine, yogurt butter, or regular butter
• 1 cup of granola.  The good stuff, Cascadian Farms is a good choice, but so is the Posey’s famous homemade granola.  If you don’t have a mom that loves to cook fabulous granola, then maybe the store brand is the way to go haha. 

• Combine your dry ingredients in a shiny, metal bowl.  The shinier the better, in my opinion.  

• I always use this guy instead of buying real buttermilk, and I have two reasons for this.  This makes much more buttermilk than a small quart you buy at a grocery store, and reason number two, nobody really likes buttermilk, so if you have leftovers they just go to waste.  Unless you’re a pig like Wilbur, he got buttermilk baths before his big show at the fair. 
• Whisk the buttermilk, eggs, and butter (or butter substitute) in another bowl.  
• Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix well.  But don’t overmix, because that just ruins things for everyone.  

• Gently fold in your delicious granola.  If you have some leftover from your recent wedding this is a good time to use it.  If you’re not recently married, nor do you have homemade granola, use some store bought kind.  

• This is the fun part!  Cook it like you would a regular pancake, unless you’re advanced, then toss it up in the air like a pizza chef.  I’m not quite there yet. Just sizzle it until the bubbles form then flip it.  This is not rocket science people. It’s pancake science, which I hear is much easier.  

• I’m all about toppings, so I had options for the beast and myself.  Choices included peanut butter, butter spray, more granola, yogurt, biscoff (tastes like cinnamon toast crunch) jam, and honey (not pictured for the sake of wanting to remain anonymous).  
• The peanut butter and honey was a fan favorite I must say.  

• Here is beast’s plate.  Like I said, peanut butter and honey in the wishing well, his personal way of eating pancakes.  Pictured next to it is his giant omelette.  If you think he’d be satisfied eating only bread for breakfast, why you’d be very wrong.  

• I took a more humble approach, and did pancakes with fruit.  I can’t compete with the monster omelette. 

On another, totally unrelated note, I bought sidewalk chalk!  Since we don’t have a driveway I resorted to decorating the stairs leading up to the apartment.  Whether or not the neighbors were annoyed by this I’ll never know, but they pretended to enjoy it. 

Notice the mushroom, he’s a fungi.  

• And the chalk turned into a reason to have a scavenger hunt inside.  haha.  He never knew he had married a 3 year old.  

The epic fusion of two worlds.  Italy meets America, dripping cheesiness meets hearty meatiness, delicious meets more delicious.  Lasagna burgers have three layers of magic.  

1. The low-fat ricotta and parmesan cheese sauce

2. The lasagna sauce with tomatoes, onions, and garlic

3. The herb-infused burger.  

The bread doesn’t count, it’s just responsible for holding all this delicious business together.  

• 2 lbs of ground beef (or pork, or chicken, you can make whatever burgers your gastric juices desire)
• Salt and pepper
• Basil, Oregano, or other Italian spice mix
• 2 Tbsp of olive oil
• 1 small onion, finely chopped
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 1 14.5oz can of Italian crushed tomatoes 
• 2 Tbsp of margarine (or butter, I used yogurt spread)
• 2 Tbsp of flour
• 1 cup of milk (I used powdered milk because that’s what I had)
• Nutmeg
• 1/2 cup of low fat ricotta cheese
• 1/4 cup of parmesan cheese
• 1/4 cup of grated mozzarella cheese
• Ciabatta rolls, English Muffins, or other small slices of bread
• 1 egg

• Finely chop you onions.  I wore goggles once to chop onions and it was super effective in preventing tears.  Try it at home.

• Melt your butter/margarine/yogurt spread into a pan. Watch it melt with glee

• Put your little onions in a pan and carmelize them, it’ll take a little bit.  They taste better this way always.
• At one point you’ll have three pans going at once, it’ll be like you have your own cooking show.  

• When your butter is melted in the other pan, add the flour and whisk for 1 minute.  Don’t let it burn like a white girl during a Texas summer.  

• After the flour, add the cup of milk, salt, pepper, and nutmeg to the pan.  Just throw a few shakes of nutmeg into the pan.  Stir this often while it thickens.  
• After it thickens ( about 5 minutes ), stir in the ricotta, parmesan, and mozzarella cheese.  Keep it warm on the stove and stir it often while you’re preparing the rest. 

• After the onions have cooked down, add your 3 cloves of garlic, using my second favorite kitchen tool, the GARLIC PRESS!  
• Simmer this for about 2 minutes 
• Then, add your can of tomato sauce with all the juices, let it simmer and then just keep it on warm while everything else is finishing

• While the garlic and onions are cooking, get your friendly neighborhood beast to make your patties!  
• The patties are pretty easy: Just mix the thawed ground beef, italian spices, salt and pepper.  Get crazy with the spices if you want.  I did Oregano, Basil, and Thyme if my memory serves me correctly. 

• Drizzle some olive oil in the pan, and put your small patties in it over medium-high heat.  It smells so delish.  

• See them turning brown?  That means the meat is cooking.  

• Here are the basic components of your lasagna burgers!  Now it’s time to assemble!  

Here they are!  So Italian, so American, so other-worldly.  They really were good.  Whether or not that low-fat cheese mix was healthy enough or not I don’t know, but it was so good I didn’t care.  We served it with healthy salad to make up for the cheese.  

Mama Mia!  Bon Appetit.  

I like feeling like a gourmet chef.  I have a secret dream to battle Bobby Flay on Iron Chef, and pretty little dishes like this make me feel like I have a chance.  I think if the secret ingredient was chicken, I’d win hands down, I feel like that’s all I cook for the beast (at his request of course).

On another note, I feel like nobody ever chooses Cat Cora to battle against, and I don’t know if that’s because she’s the only woman or because she looks so scary.  Most people pick Bobbly Flay because he’s the most famous, but I want to battle him because I think he has kind eyes and is a compassionate, kindhearted opponent.  He wouldn’t laugh if I lost.  

So these were pretty delicious, pretty nice to look at, and really easy.  

Ingredients: 

• 2 large eggs, lightly beaten
• 1 cup of bread crumbs 
• 1 and 1/2 cups of ricotta cheese
• 1 cup of sun dried tomatoes
• 8 chicken breasts ( about 1.5 lbs)
• 1/4 cup of EVOO.  Thanks Rach.  
• Italian Seasoning
• Salt
• Pepper 

• In 3 separate bowls, put your eggs with salt and pepper (whisked), bread crumbs, and ricotta cheese mixed with sun dried tomatoes
• Dip the chicken into the egg mixture, then cover them with bread crumbs 

• Now put your Italian seasoning all over the chicken cutlets

• Put your ricotta cheese/sun-dried tomato business in the middle of the chicken and fold it over kind of like a burrito.  

• Once you have assembled your chicken ricotta burrito, drizzle with olive oil.  Drizzle is a funny word in all contexts.  ”It’s drizzling outside,” makes me think of a giant chef in the sky with a big bottle of olive oil, gently flicking his wrist and covering the world in a little shower of moisture.  
• Bake at 400 degrees for about 20 minutes, until the chicken is golden and the cheese is dancing with little bubbles.  

This reminds me of a quote from A Bug’s Life.  Mosquito #1: Don’t look at it!  (talking about the bug zapper, but here I’m referring to chicken) Mosquito #2: I can’t help it, it’s so beautiful!  

Serve it with something green, it brings out the colors and looks like Christmas.  

I almost wish that didn’t rhyme so well.  It’s a little cutesy.  

We made YUMMY homemade apple pie.  It’s always worth it to use fresh apples and butter.  This recipe is via my best friend, Kim Seliga, and the decoration with the star in the middle was a Rachel Posey addition, the pie couldn’t have been the same without it.  Without the star, the pie would’ve been an apple mushpot.  

Ingredients: 

• 2 crusts for a 9-inch pie.  You can make these yourself with this recipe: <http://www.bettycrocker.com/recipes/pastry-for-pies-and-tarts/e74dfc22-dd54-4564-b653-0f142faf91a2>, or you can do frozen pie crusts.  We used frozen because we made this at a boy’s house.  Do you really think they had flour and shortening?  We might as well have asked them for Perfume and nail polish remover
• 2 Tbsp of flour
• 3 tart apples ( like Granny Smith ) 
• 3 sweet apples ( like Golden Delicious ) 
• 3/4 cup of sugar
• 1 tsp of cinnamon
• 1 Tbsp of lemon juice 

Preheat your oven to 425 degrees, and mix up your dry ingredients.  

• Peel your apples.  Here’s the beautiful Kim Seliga and her capable hands.  

• Slice your apples very thinly.  We have this cafe in Bryan that slices apples so thinly it’s incredible.  It seems like a feat that’s beyond human ability, and they’re so good.  

• Isn’t she LOVELLLLYYY!  Here she is, still slaving away and peeling apples.  I’m telling you, this girl and I have jumped off cliffs together, jumped out of planes, been in cars with strangers, and defended each other from countless attacks from hungry men.  I trust her to peel the apples.  

• Tossed your thinly sliced apples with your dry ingredients.  Then, add your lemon juice.  Mix it well, and only eat a couple of apples coated with sugar and cinnamon.  We need the rest for the pie.  

• Put your pie crust in a pie pan, unless it comes in one, then just dump the apples mixture into the pan.  
• With the other pie crust, cut long strips and layer them across the pie in a grid pattern to create the crusty top. 

• Like this!  If you’ll notice, there’s also a star design on top of our pie.  That star, created with love by Rachel, was the only reason the pie tasted good at all.  Without her expertise and pastry experience, this pie never would’ve been created.  So I guess this post is really just a big ‘thank you’ to my sister for taking the time out of her round-the-world baking tour to teach us a thing or two about making pie crust.  
• Bake for 35-45 minutes, or until the apples are tender and the crust is golden brown.  I love that term, it sounds so warm and delicious when you say it aloud: GOLDEN BROWN.  Try it yourself at home.  

• Thank you Rachel.  The pie was worth that plane ticket I bought you that brought you home from the baking institute in Berlin.  
• Please serve this with ice cream, it’s better that way. 

The rest of our weekend was awesome.  Here’s a little taste of what else we ate and did. 

These were our sexy $3 cut off tees from Wal Mart.  We also wore visors that were essentially the result of a tennis-mom’s affair with a hillbilly. 

Oreo Cake balls!  These were so delicious, I ate like 7 in one sitting at 1am on Saturday.  

Kim’s fourth of July cupcakes!