superbowl weekend

i didn't do a whole lot this last weekend, and it was fabulous.

saturday morning was spent cleaning. deep cleaning. i washed all my living room blankets - i'm a firm believer in having lots available for cuddling up in - my living room curtains, the throw pillow cases, vacuumed all the ceiling corners, reorganized my desk area, inventoried and organized my spice cupboard and all sorts of good cleaning like that. does anybody else find cleaning as relaxing and refreshing as i do?

i also rearranged a little, as this purple plant is starting to get away from me and i switched out stands to keep it up off the floor.




and my dryer broke saturday night :-( it is quite old, older than me, but i think it can be fixed. everything still sounds like it's working right with the motor, i think it needs a new belt to turn the drum. even though i still air dry a lot of things, i've now become accustomed to having it available. i'm not looking forward to scooting it out of its cubbyhole and taking the back off and figuring out the inner workings of a clothes dryer....

i spent saturday evening cooking some things to eat during the superbowl. while i was cooking, this is what the him was doing. it's blurry, but you get the idea:


he had sat at my dining room table visiting with me for a long time, then moved to the loveseat.

'i won't fall asleep if i'm reading.'

yeah right.

next thing i heard was snoring.

but anyway. i finished up my cooking, and this is some of what i made. not very good photos of the finished product. i need to do better with that.

these are the pepper biscuits i made in my mini muffin tins. they have red and orange peppers in them, and i think they would have been good with some cheddar cheese and chives in the mix as well.



this is the nacho cheesecake dip that i made, and boy did it make a lot. i'll have to put half in the freezer. i should have taken photos of it when we cut into it, but it's basically a savory cheesecake, with cream cheese, chicken and taco seasoning on a crushed tortilla-chip crust.

i think it could have used more seasoning - i like a lot of flavor - and it might be better served warm. and i used two packages of cream cheese and two cans of chicken breast, and next time i'd definitely cut it down to smaller proportions.

i used the canned chicken because i don't cook a lot of chicken anymore. i used to keep a bag of frozen chicken breasts on hand, but now that i hang out with the him and other beef people, 'yard bird' is frowned upon. that, and the beef and pork industries are both united against poultry. but anyway, back to the canned chicken concept. it was actually ok, tasted like normal chicken and flaked easily when i added it to the mixture.




the third thing i made was lemon cookies, which turned out with a shortbread consistency, and a basic buttercream lemon frosting. they were pretty good. lemony, and not too sweet. i don't have a photo of that finished product.

i've been using truvia in my recipes lately, because the him's a diabetic and so i try to go sugar-free when i can. it's pretty good, but it does have a bit of an aftertaste, but maybe that's just getting used to it. and i've made two cookie recipes with it and they both turned out a little crumbly. they were both new recipes so i'm not sure if that's just how they are, or if the truvia has something to do with that.



when will the truvia people start packaging it in bulk so us poor cooks won't have to open all those little paper packages??

so yesterday morning i fed my ponies and cleaned their pens before the snow came, and about 1 the him and i headed over to friend jamie's where a bunch of that crowd was gathered for a lobster and mahi mahi lunch. we hung out with them for a while, then headed to friend heather's to watch the football game.

this is the him and friend jake bs-ing in heather's kitchen.


you see that rather large goblet on the corner of the counter? yeah, that was my crown goblet, and the last one i drank that evening didn't hit me until i was home in bed, thankfully. we had a lovely afternoon/evening watching football, visiting and playing a few rounds of apples to apples.