Ham&Cheese Egg Casserole, Fruit Salad, Blueberry Muffins!

After a late(ish) night out last night for Elizabeth's birthday, I woke up this morning and made brunch! I made an "egg strata" which was an egg casserole with ham, cheese, eggs, chives, and bread with paprika sprinkled on top and some other seasonings. For this recipe I had to use "fully cooked smoked ham." Ew. See picture of sketchy ham attached. The casserole turned out tasting pretty good in the bites that didn't have any ham. The ham was REALLY salty, so we'll be looking for a different brand next time. Or maybe when I learn to cook ham I can chop some up and freeze it and save it for this. Also, I forgot to grease the pan for this one. Woops!! One of the pictures is of the stuck-on-food pan-flunk. Shane cleaned it though! He totally makes all this cooking possible by washing ALL the dishes.

I also made a gigantic fruit salad with a pineapple (my first time ever cutting up a pineapple!), grapes, oranges (that I cut up chef style, cutting out the individual sections from the orange), apples (cut with my trusty apple-cutter that you can see in some of the pictures), and grapes. I made lemon-honey-poppyseed dressing and tossed it all together in a big Tupperware. It tastes delicious! And as an extra perk, the lemon juice keeps the apples from turning brown. Note: if you're going to make fruit salad, cut up the apples LAST before you put the lemon juice or dressing on, because they start to turn brown really quickly.

Last but not least, I made blueberry muffins with fresh blueberries. We haven't tasted those yet, but with flour, sugar, and blueberries, how can you really go wrong? The recipe was supposed to make 12 muffins but I think the ice cream scoop I used for the batter was too big so it only made 10.

Learned today: I inherited my mom's tendency to cuss when I cook! I could have sworn this would be less messy than making buffalo wings, but it soo wasn't! I cracked eggs all over the counter, tried to shake up an inadequately closed tupperware and flung dressing and pineapple chunks everywhere, and got 4 knives, 2 cutting boards, and more than one set of measuring cups and spoons dirty. If this didn't make a lot of delicious food that Shane could eat, I don't think he would be so tolerant of my mess!