Bake a cake inside an orange – It’s grill time!
Who would’ve thunk it? These guys made ‘em while camping, but I think they’d be fun just throwing some on the grill during the summer, too, instead of turning on the oven inside. A batch makes 10-12 oranges and unless you’ve made this before, I highly doubt most of those grabbing an orange cake could say they’ve ever eaten a cake quite like this.
Quirky midnight snacks – Strange cravings are meant to be indulged
Some people need their food to be separated neatly on plates with no edges or sauces touching.
Me? I have no issues mixing foods. In fact, I often go out of my way to eat multiple foods together at once, even if it’s not the traditional way to eat them.
Khorre teases me on a regular basis about my once nightly habit of eating spaghetti and boiled* eggs. I couldn’t get enough of them and it took weeks to kick the craving.
Others aren’t really strange to me at all, but because I’ve walked through the kitchen with a bowl more than once and gotten a “Really Jessi? Seriously??” I figure maybe they’re not as normal as I suspected. So this last month, I started taking pictures of some of my snack fests, just in case.
Spaghetti, french fries, ketchup, and yes, brown mustard there, too. I wish I could say I tried to keep them separated, but most bites had some of each.
Chips dipped straight into the avocado. What? Sometimes I don’t want to bother with the knife and spoon process.
Orzo rice with french onion dip gravy, along side lettuce and salsa for a pseudo-salad.
Lamb. We’ll leave it at that. Shhh.
This one’s normal, right? Quick sandwich of bologna I got for free, sliced tomatoes, avocado, and Italian dressing.
Leftover corn on the cob….no butter, no salt, eaten over my laptop. Not exactly the cleanest snack, but could be worse.
Cream cheese and pepperoni sandwiches
Who am I kidding? I don’t take the time to make several mini-sandwiches. It’s usually eaten more like this:
Dipping pepperoni in a spoonful of cream cheese is much more convenient. Hey, I never claimed they were healthy snacks…
*If it’s hard-boiled, I add butter. If it’s soft-boiled, I let the yolk make the creaminess and just add salt and pepper as usual.
Ladybugs on boats and bacon caterpillars – Tyson grilled chicken
I guess they’re more like rafts, since I didn’t add bacon sails like I considered, but still better than ants on a log.
Actually, my final dish is completely different than what I originally had in mind. Tyson and Foodbuzz sent me a coupon to try out Tyson’s new Grilled & Ready items. Turns out, my store only carries the chicken variety and not the steak like I was planning on, so those plans got scrapped.
Then I thought they were more stick-like and less flat, so my ideas involving various sized cubes wasn’t really going to look right. The next step I got mostly right, realizing they were larger pieces, but I was a bit disappointed to see that it wasn’t all strips like I thought it’d be.
See? There are a fair number of chicken strip type pieces but most weren’t very long and there were way more “bits” than I would’ve expected. Oh well. At least there were plenty of little pieces to taste test, I guess. :P
Ultimately, instead of the chicken becoming the main focus of the dish like would be typical of a review, the pieces were used as vehicles for my ladybugs. Had there been more full pieces like there should’ve been, there would’ve been way more ladybugs.
I wanted some bacon caterpillars, but wasn’t sure how well they’d hold up.
To get this little guys, I sliced turkey bacon into smaller strips, folded it onto toothpicks (skewers for the larger snake-esque ones, and just free form with the squiggly ones), and baked them on an greased baking sheet.
They slid off surprisingly well, but that left me with some holes to deal with. Which of course meant, more smiley faces. :P
It looks more like a ghost there, huh? Ooooooo.
While I’m at it, I had some other, um, odd turnouts. Before I settled on exactly how to make the ladybugs, I tried several variations.
Some were obviously better than others. When I was trying to cut the tomatoes the other direction, I got some weird lumpy ones, so I added smiley faces to those, too, and made ‘em look like something from Monsters Inc.
Alright, alright, enough pictures. Anyway, Tyson’s Grilled & Ready chicken was definitely tasty. L even said it was her favorite part of the dish, even over and above the bacon (*gasp*). It stayed tender and moist, heated up quickly, and the grill marks were a nice touch. I do wish the pieces had been more uniform in size and shape, but oh well, it tasted great and gave me a reason to split up the package into two dishes.
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