That time B was jealous of the dog’s dinner…

dog, funny, humor, pets, stories | February 6, 2015 | By

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For about a year, I was pretty hardcore into cooking healthy for the entire family. We tried no dairy to isolate allergies; we tried bento boxes for a healthy twist on brown bagging’; we focused on homegrown produce and local meats; we cut out MSG, certain yellow preservatives, and white sugar; we replaced soy with things like amino acid sauce…

I didn’t go nuts with it all, but if you had my brownies during this time, you better believe they had pumpkin puree in them and you had no idea.

This also means that I made all of the dog’s food from scratch, too. If you aren’t familiar with how spoiled this dog was before we adopted him, it’s worth a few tear-jerking moments here.

I fully recognize that this isn’t really the norm, but it’s what worked for us and I didn’t think much of it. It was simply part of the routine and what needed to be done in order to keep everyone healthy and happy, so it’s what I did.

Well… that is… until one day, the girls came home from school and B saw me mixing the weekly batch of dog food in the kitchen sink.

(Yes, you read that correctly, by the way. Using the sink is a whole lot easier to mix a large batch in than trying to find an appropriate mixing bowl that will happily slop it all over the counter or table while you’re mixing and scooping. Just toss it all in the sink, do your thing, and when you’re done, run some watch to clean up. Voila!)

Anyway, so they come in and B is clearly excited, “Is that supper?!?” To which I could only reply that no, no that is not their supper, and that the food she is so obviously drooling over is indeed the family pet’s dinner instead.

She was noticeably disappointed at that point and announced, “I wish I could eat Buddy’s dinner… ” which is the same point where I realized that I had unknowingly created jealousy over a dog’s food. Oops!

I made up for it immediately by changing our dinner plans to something extra yummy, but it was the first time I had ever seen someone wish s/he were eating an animal’s food instead. I’m not sure if that means the food I was feeding the dog was particularly delicious or if I was failing in the excitement factor for the human food being produced.

Either way, the dog was certainly being fed well, eh?12

A Rose for Your Bros–Perfect Bacon Roses for Valentine’s Day

bacon, holidays, pork, valentine's day, videos | February 6, 2015 | By

I cannot think of a better bouquet of flowers, so this is definitely not for men only.

If you want to do a little something extra for your guy this V-Day, though, maybe a dozen bacon roses would do the trick.

Just make sure you make an extra dozen for yourself… ;)

Snowmen pancakes with bacon scarves – Quirky doesn’t mean time consuming

Snowman pancakes with bacon

Back when I was regularly making quirky food art, people would often ask me “how do you have time for that??”

I would love to say that I spent hours and hours on some of these projects, but realistically,  most of them were thrown together at the last minute. Or… even when I was pre-planning and knew I wanted to do something quirky, the end result was still only going to take a couple extra minutes to make.

For example, the snowman pancake above…. Without the quirky factor, I would’ve still been making bacon and pancakes, so the amount of time it takes to make those remain the same regardless.

The only real difference is that instead of making a single pancake in a pan or on a griddle, I put two small ones right next to each other (one slightly bigger than the other, of course). Instead of putting the bacon on the side of the plate, I laid it carefully on top to create a snowman scarf.

And do you know how long it took me to dig out chocolate chips and M&M’s from the cabinet to create the eyes, noses, and buttons? Probably 30 seconds…maybe a full minute if the box where I keep all those goodies got pushed to the back and required I climb on a cabinet to reach them. Whoop-de-do.

Snowman pancakes with bacon

I made several different snowmen that day because there were multiple people needing fed, but even so, that means with an assembly-line production, I maybe added an extra five minutes to how long it took for breakfast. Nobody starved in that amount of time and my daily schedule wasn’t drastically thrown off that day. That amount of time was less than it takes to find the missing shoe for any given morning, so if it means spending those few minutes to make everyone giggle when they get their plates… I’m good with that.