A Very UnBetty Recipe: Bacon Cheddar Biscuits

For some reason, I get loads of catalogs at my apartment. I have never lived in once place for more than about nine months before now, and I guess that's what happens when you dig in somewhere (and do all of your shopping online!) A couple of weeks ago I got a Williams-Sonoma catalog that had a bacon cheddar biscuit recipe next to the All-Clad skillets. Okay, does that not sound freaking delicious? Bacon... Cheddar... Biscuits???

Here's how it went... I cooked six pieces of bacon in my skillet (not all clad, but a similar type of shiny silver skillet) which created a ton of bacon grease. I put the bacon on a paper towel to soak up the excess grease and poured out the extra into a Bon Maman jelly jar for safe keeping, burning the crap out of my hand in the process.

Next, I mixed up the biscuit dough along with diced bacon, shredded sharp cheddar, shredded parmesan, and a little bit of pepper. I kneaded and rolled out the dough on my first ever floured surface (hard to believe I have a counter clean enough for that, right?) with my new pink silicone rolling pin handed down from Mom.

Next, I spread out the bacon grease on the bottom of the skillet and cut out the biscuits. Target didn't have biscuit cutters, so I found the closest thing, Nordic Ware cookie cutters! We now have a Ziploc container of heart and scalloped square-shaped biscuits on the counter. They're a little burnt, but sooo good! Thanks Bacon Grease!

Now I'm off to make a practice pumpkin pie. There's a pot luck Friday at work, and I gotta get it right!

Black Bean Soup Didn't Miss Her

Last night I made yummy black bean soup, and now we have some in the freezer! And proved once again that anything tastes delicious with bacon grease :)

I cooked bacon for a minute in the bottom of my Chantal saucepan (stirring a TON, so I didn't end up with another burnt, stinky french onion soup type situation) then added onions and garlic powder to a little bit of bacon grease and cooked them. To that, I added chicken broth, chopped carrots and celery, crushed red pepper, and parsley which I diced up with my new nifty new Oxo herb dicer from Target. Cooking causes a whole new type of unnecessary Target purchases. It used to usually be just clothes that I'd impulse purchase, now I've added cooking gadgets! Good thing I got a new job too :)

I boiled all of that until the carrots and celery were tender, then added a can of black beans, 1/2 cup of them mashed and cooked that until the beans were soft. This made a delicious soup! I ate a bowl and froze three. This morning I grabbed a frozen container of soup and took it to work for lunch. Yum! And healthy... aside from the bacon grease. But fat makes brain cells, right??

Unhealthy Yet Delicious... Cheesy Penne Bake

The only healthy part about this recipe may have been the whole wheat penne, and maybe the crushed tomatoes if you want to stretch it, but it sure does taste good!

First, I cooked up some Italian sausage (which I NEVER would have found if Momma wouldn't have told me to look by the bratwurst) in the frying pan. Italian sausage looks a lot like bratwurst, but you bust open the sausage and squeeze it out so it looks kind of like ground beef. You can eat the casing too, apparently, as it showed on the package. So that whole squeezing out sausage thing was really gross, and nearly made me loose my appetite.

Next, I mixed a large can of crushed tomatoes with basil and garlic powder. For recipes that call for garlic and leave the option of using garlic powder, I always use garlic powder now. It's just not worth cutting up a piece of garlic and having my eyes water like crazy just to get the yucky taste of garlic! A sprinkle of garlic powder'll do.

While I was prepping all that, I boiled the whole wheat penne. The recipe called for rigatoni but that was nowhere to be found at H-E-B.

In a glass pan, I layered the pasta, sausage, tomato mixture, mozzarella and parmesan. I always mess up when I have to layer things! Messed up my lasagna, too. It ended up okay in the end though, I just added more cheese to the top :). This turned out great. It's not as great as the lasagna, but it wasn't nearly as much work. Made a good dinner/leftovers/lunch at work.

My final picture today is of GERMBOT. Shane is going to teach some kindergarten kids about handwashing next week using GloGerm, and this will be their box to look at their hands under the blacklight. We made this together yesterday :).

Aaaaand she's back!

Phew! It's been a busy few weeks. For the past three weekends I--went to a wedding with Shane, gave a lecture at the Texas Academy of Family Physicians conference in Houston, and gave the same lecture in Dallas. During the weekdays, I worked and did Pilates two days a week. It's been busy, but good busy!

Needless to say, I had to take a break from the Abby/Betty project. But I'm back! First thing today when I got home from Dallas I sat down and picked out some recipes, went to the grocery store, and came home and made two things. Also, I couldn't resist the red polka-dotted pie dish at H-E-B. I'll use it to make my pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving :).

Today for dinner we had Turkey Caesar Wraps. I bought a Caesar salad kit from H-E-B, two roma tomatoes, and a rotisserie turkey breast, and we wrapped it all up in tortillas from H-E-B (the kind you buy raw, so they are delicious once cooked up). This was yummy, and totally realistic for a quick dinner after work for Shane and me.

I also made (and just tasted today, we didn't eat it yet) Lemon-Basil Pasta Salad with Turkey. The recipe consisted of boiling spiral pasta, adding asparagus with about 3 minutes to go, draining that, then adding parmesan cheese, lemon zest, olive oil, garlic powder, and turkey. I tasted it, and it's yum! It will be better tomorrow when it's all cold and all the flavors have mixed together. Good lunch for work :).

Coming up this week: tuna salad. I've made tuna salad before, but I've been meaning to make it for a while (we both like it) and it's in my Betty book! Well, I'm super glad to be done with my two lectures, and I hear they went well. No matter how I do, I always think my own lectures are bad. Okay, gotta go watch Brothers and Sisters now! Happy to get back to Abby/Betty :).