Lunch : Bagel Dogs!

So, something that I used to eat as a kid, and when I say kid, I mean 14 year old.  Were Bagel Dogs.  My mom got them from the Schwan's Man, when he dropped off our milk. Yeah, we had a milk man.  My mom was busy doing whatever work she was doing, and it was easier to make sure that we had milk in the house if we had someone drop it off.  I guess.

Either way.  Bagel Dogs. I came across a pin on the Pintrest, which brought me to Circle B Kitchen's blog post.

I made them and can cross them off the list of wish to re-create at home.  But I will never do it again.  I am sure the original recipe is fine, and it was probably more of user error or something.  But they were way too much work, and took way too long to make.  And I burned my little fingers.

So, for a true bagel, you need to boil it before you bake it.  All of my hot dogs fell out of their wrappers.  So once I thought they were boiled sufficiently, I took them out, and burned my fingers trying to put them back in their jackets, and getting them to seal up as they dried a little.

They don't look terrible, other than the not being too brown, they were chewy, the salt and seeds were delicious.  I didn't know what else to serve it with, all I could think about was Kraft Cheese and Macaroni.  And then I decided to bust open a can of fruit cocktail for good measure.  We also dipped the Bagel Dogs in traditional hot dog condiments.

I am putting this in the Fail column.

Have you made them and had better results?

Dinner : Crock-Pot Sesame Chicken!

OH MY GOSH!

Have you tried this?  It is so yummy! And it was quite easy.

I found the recipe on Pintrest.  The link matched up to chef in training blog.  She is gorgeous.  I followed the recipe as written, only thing I changed up, was I cut up the chicken while it was still chilled prior to putting it into the crock pot, so I didn't have to do it later when it was messy. 

I will also say, I took the sauce out of the crock-pot, and put it in a pan to try to reduce it.  COMPLETLY forgetting that I had the corn starch out for some reason.  Once I realized the err in my way, it was quick and easy.

I served it with some steamed broccoli, and some brown 'asian' rice from Uncle Ben's.

Again, it was SUPER delicious!  You should try it, and tell me all about it!

Manicure Monday : Christmas Tree

For this week, I decided to try out the Christmas tree thing that I've seen a fair amount on Pintrest.

Mine didn't turn out as cute as some of the others I have seen, but, they are all right.

Just a few more weeks left of this year, and this is probably one of the only New Year's resolutions I have kept.

The other one that I may have kept, is to try a new recipe once a week, which would be 52 recipes..
I will have to go through my phone photos to see if I did it.. I might have though.. :)

Poor Man's Pad Thai

I love peanut butter.  I actually quite enjoy Ramen Noodles.  They are super cheap. And completely unhealthy.  I never had to live on Ramen, I lived at home through college. Both times that I went full time.

Chicken flavor is my favorite.  I tried one a couple weeks ago that was a spicy shrimp or something, it was good too.

But anyways, I saw a pin on the Pintrest.  Peanut Butter, Sriracha Sauce, and Ramen?!  WHAT!  That is out of this world! I had to try it.  So I did, and I have been eating it probably 1-2 times a week, for the past month.

Here is my delicious concoction.  Mind you, this is purely my preference/flavor combo for eating.

So, basically you make your Ramen, drain out about half the water, add 2 tablespoons of peanut butter (not organic, I tried that, it wasn't good). And add 2 tablespoons of Sriracha sauce. Or if you don't like it so hot, start with less, and increase to your liking.  They say you can use chunky peanut butter, I have also tried that, it didn't really do anything for me.  I posted the reicpe on my Recipe page, if you want it without all my posty stuff, check out the other stuff there too!

Once you have eaten all of your noodles, slurp, yes, slurp all of your delicious noodle water juices.  I LOVE that part.

Have you tried a weird flavor combination that was a little questionable at first?

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween out there! 

As an adult, I like it more, but usually just for the Halloween Parties!  The ones I attend, generally have a lot of alcohol.

This party, however, was for work, and I needed to bring something appropriate.  One Pot Luck item that I enjoy the most, is Spinach dip and Hawaiian Rolls.  Super simple, and people will generally eat it all gone.  Today was no different.

I bought the rolls, and cut them up into squares, and then I came up with brilliant idea to use a French roll as the body for a mummy, and then you could dip into his stomach!  I couldn't get the head idea to work out well, I chopped it up, but I never cut all the way through, so there was the opportunity to salvage it!!

I took 5 connected paper towels and cut them into long strips, and used those as the strips around him, and just colored with permanent marker for the eyes.  I think he turned out pretty good.

Spinach Mummy Dip

To help me get in the Halloween Spirit, with out dressing up, I cut up my fiance's shirt, based on something I saw on Pintrest.  He wasn't the most thrilled, but I bought him a package of muscle shirts last week, and this was an old one that had a tiny hole in it anyway.  Boys can be such babies.

I wore the muscle shirt over a black button down, the front I left plain, and just wore some long heavy black and silver necklaces. I didn't take a good photo of my hair, or make up, but the hair was pinned in a kind of a mohawk fashion, and I had heavy black eye makeup on.  It was a little interesting when one of my boss' (yes, I have two. It's super fun - not.) came by and was 'Whoa.. I am going to have to get used to this look.'

Here is a photo of my shirt from the back:

Aside from the bad blurry photo, you can kind of see my wedding dress hanging in a long clear bag, it has an apron over it so, even if the fiance does happen to come into my dressing room, he can't see the top, or really any of the details of it.

What do you think of the dip or the shirt?  I could have probably done a little better, if I wasn't already late heading out of the door, and cutting last minute.

Do you do anything, as an adult without children for holidays?  I would love to hear below!

Manicure Monday : Spooky Eyes

It's the week of Halloween!

And with that in mind, I painted my nails black, I had seen on Pintrest these cute little googly eyed guys, and I knew I wanted to recreate them!  The original pin was from the Icy Nails blog.

It's pretty basic.  Use a pen/pencil/toothpick, or anything with a tip, and put a large dot of the white. Once that is dry, then go back with a smaller tipped item, and put a little black dot on it to make the pupil.  Then, seal it with a topcoat!

Hope you enjoyed. Check out Icy Nails' blog, and if you tried it, let me know! I would love to share your photos!

BLT's... mMMMmmMMmm....

Who doesn't love bacon?  Have you started baking your bacon in the oven yet?  I have, I like it, but to an extent.  See, yes, it is easy, and yes, you just toss it in, have no worries of frying bacon naked, and free up your stove top for other things.  BUT (and maybe it's just my oven) it tends to take like.. for-ev-er.

At any rate, I I came across this pin, and went to the source.  She used a whiskey/brown sugar syrup on it.  I did not, I am a purest.  I like my bacon - as bacon.

Pretty much followed her directions, for the most part.  I cut the bacon strips in half, weaved them set them in the oven at 350 for about a half hour/forty-five minutes. and then slapped them on top of  some lettuce and miracle whip on wheat toasted bread.

Looks great, right?  Well, it was, sort of.  Let me level with you.  I like a lot of bacon on my sandwich, and I always omit the tomato (not my thing).  But, biting into the bacon sandwich, there was too much bacon. And I generally do use probably about 6 half slices.. not sure why I wasn't a fan of this way.  It was fun, and I had high hopes, it just didn't pan out.

So, moral of the post, I will not do crosshatch/weave bacon again, but and I will use the oven, but only when I have large groups of people over, or need a mass quantity of cooked bacon. 

I am half thinking about buying the pre-cooked stuff in the store. Have you tried the pre-cooked bacon, or do you know of a fantastically faster way to make it in the oven?  Maybe I am doing something wrong. 

Thoughts?

Microwave Caramels

Ohhhhh Pintrest, you are a semi-ridiculous obsession.  If you have not heard of Pintrest, man are you lucky.  Basically what it is, is an online corkboard where you 'pin' things you like.  You can have what I imagine are an unlimited amount of boards. 

A few boards that I have are: Dinner, Let's Do Lunch, Breakfast, Drink Up, Spook-tac-u-lar, Bake Me A Cake, and Winter Wonderland.  They are pretty obvious what I have been pinning to each board.  Basically items that would fall into dinner ideas, get pinned to Dinner, lunch to the Lunch board, and Halloween items to the Spook-tac-u-lar board.  Pretty simp - right?  And super addicting.

I literally can waste about an hour a day on that site, on my nifty little iPhone.  If you know anyone that has a Pintrest account, they can attest, that they waste so much time on it.

Well one day back in March or something I came across a Pin for Microwave Caramels that I pinned to my 'Treat Time' board.  Takes only 6 minutes and five ingredients, and you don't have to fuss with a thermometer.  Perfect, because I don't own one of those anyways. 

So I started out, and I swear I always screw up when a recipe calls for x cups of butter.  Plus I hate when it does not indicate if it's salted or unsalted butter.  I know when you bake, generally you use unsalted, but why can't you just indicate if I should be using salted or unsalted butter in the recipe!!! Shoot.. 

At any rate the recipe calls for a 1/4 cup of butter.  I look at the package it says blah blah 1/4 cup of butter.  Perfect.  So I put the whole stick in.

I start melting the butter and the rest of the ingredients.  And at the 3 minute mark, it looks like there is an awful lot of butter in it, what an oil slick.  I have made taffy and caramel before, and I know this is not going to form a cohesive substance no matter how long I have this in the microwave or let cool.  So I scratch my head and think to myself, Self, what the heck went wrong here....  let's look at this again.. okay, 1/4 cup of butter. I re-read the stick of butter, 4 tbs = 1/4 cup, okay.  Look at the stick again.. oh.... there are 8 tbs in a stick.  Why the heck didn't they just say 1/2 stick of butter!!!

SHOOT. Gosh.  Man, sometimes I wish I could comprehend things better.  Well, let's double this biotch.  So I dump in the rest of the ingredients again, to make it double.  And start heating/stirring it up.  I cooked it a little longer because I needed to make sure it all got hot enough to the boiling or whatever that traditional caramels need... and then I decided I would put some in a couple of silicone ice trays that I had that were in the shapes of stars.  Well, doy.  Of course I am going to burn myself with the extremely hot caramel, why wouldn't I? I mean, I have been doing so well with this super simple recipe so far.

Once I have 12 little silicone stars filled, I dump the rest into the buttered 8 x 8 Pyrex, and throw them all in the fridge.  Other people said they wouldn't leave it in there for 20 minutes, so I kept checking them to see if they were hardened enough. 

Uh. No.  I checked at every 5 minutes for an hour.  They were not hard enough.  Then I moved to checking at every half hour. After 2 hours, they were not solid enough.  I would cut through them with a knife, and they were never solid enough to keep the cuts visible.  So I left them overnight, and put the silicone trays in the freezer.

This morning I checked on them, they were sort of ready?  I pulled them out and cut them, and took each piece out, and layed them seperately on a piece of plastic wrap.  And threw them back in the freezer, because I could see they were wanting to relax, spread out again.

Caramels after being in the freezer all day.

They taste good.  I mean, they are soft.  I think it would be super delish to put over ice cream, or throw on some popcorn, well, maybe the popcorn will be too messy yet, since it never really set up.  But it's good, put it in your coffee for a lovely caramel coffee treat.  But yeah, not worth trying to wrap up in individuals.  Too many things went wrong with this to tell if it's user error, or what.  Plus it's in a microwave, and microwaves vary greatly.

Try a different recipe that I have previously posted, check out the ones that are not a fail in my book.

I might make this and then a fudge sauce and then put them in some jars, and give as Christmas gifts or something for an ice cream topping gift.  It really would be good.

The silicones?  I threw them away, caramel stuff and all.

So.  Fail for what I wanted them to be.  But success for ice cream or coffee.  Have you tried this recipe?

*Update*  I dipped the frozen caramels in melted chocolate, to see if the chocolate would hold them together to make them something you could put in a dish or something, it sort of worked, I should have made sure I had a thick coating on them.  The caramel was soft like in a Milky Way bar.