It may not look like much, but this is EATIN' food!

HOLY BALLS. The food I made today was sooo good! I achieved my goal of making a true comfort meal after a week of restaurant food and being away from my boys, Shane and Frankie.

I changed my menu a little bit from the original, because my cookbook doesn't have the scalloped potatoes recipe. I'll have to get that from Beth. I made the mashed potatoes that were part of the Thanksgiving Dinner recipes. I also enhanced the green beans recipe. I called Mom and asked her how to season the potatoes (thinking she would say salt and pepper and butter or something like that) and she explained how to make them with bacon and onions, so I decided to do that. I'll do the run-down of what I made, but it was all AWESOME!

1. Outrageous Chocolate-White Chocolate Chunk Cookies with Pecans. I am not a huge fan of cookies, but objectively, these are really good! I had a little trouble cooking them. The ingredients were hard to mix up and made kind of a crumbly mixture that looked more like a streusel than cookie dough. I was able to fix it by mixing it up a little more on low with the handheld mixer, and smooshing it all together in an ice-cream scoop to make the cookies stick together. They still came out a little crumbly, but they taste delicious!
2. Meatloaf. A Momma-made comfort-food classic. Baked with ketchup on top. YUM. I will share a piece of wisdom I had even before the Abby/Betty Project: organic ketchup is SOO GOOD. I learned this because Shane's mom is into all things organic, so I had it at their house. It is one of the things that is worth paying the extra money for just because it tastes good, even if you aren't into the whole organic thing.
3. Mashed Potatoes. BAM! I aced the mashed potatoes. All the tricks Mom shared in our phone conversation this morning surely helped: (a) Don't boil the crap out of the potatoes. Bring them to a boil with the lid on, then just lightly bubbling for the remaining time they are cooking. (b) Cook the potatoes a little more once you drain them to get rid of the excess water. (c) Use giant brown russet baking potatoes. They taste yummy, and I think they also take less time to peel because it's just a few huge potatoes instead of a lot of small ones. Other than that, I just added warm milk, Brummel & Brown, salt, and pepper, and I totally redeemed myself for the nasty garlic smashed potatoes!
4. Green Beans with Bacon and Onions. O. M. G. These are good. I mean, there's probably a rule that if you put bacon fat in something, it's good, but I would still like to take full credit. I "blanch and shocked" the green beans: boiled them at a rolling boil until tender, then drained them and put them in iced water, which kept them bright green when they were done. I cooked the bacon, then cooked the onion slowly in the bacon grease, then added the green beans and bacon back to the mixture. Yum.

Now Shane and I are sitting on the couch watching a movie on Comedy Central drinking Lone Star Beer and Gold Peak Sweetened Iced Tea, respectively, our bellies all full of delicious food :).