Saturday, October 29, 2011

long time no see

Why hello, iklektik. I have missed you. Working full time has made evenings super lazy, and weekends super busy. Work is great and the weekends are fun, but blogging has taken a back to seat to important things like making good friends with the couch and watching episode after episode of house hunters. I haven't even been taking pictures! Usually when I get in a blogging lull, I'll have a big back log of pictures that I want to get around to blogging but usually don't. This time, I don't even have pictures.


I do have some links to share though! Ever since I got a pinterest account I've had tons of cooking inspiration all neatly organized in one place. When I do meal planning on Sundays, I plan a few meals based on what we have in the cabinets already, and then I go to my pinterest food board. Here are some recipes I've tried lately with great results:








Really easy, pan fried, crispy chicken. I had never, ever fried anything before I made this chicken, and I was actually kind of intimidated by it. This was easy, and it was delicious!



Brown Sugar and Balsamic Glazed pork loin. When I've tried pork in the crockpot before, I didn't have great results, and I think it's because I didn't buy a great cut of pork. A pork loin is kind of expensive, but since most of them are quite large, I was able to cut a $10 pork loin in half, freeze half, and get two crock pot meals out of it. I can definitely handle a $5 meal for two, especially when it includes leftovers for lunch, and ESPECIALLY when it's as amazingly good as this was. I cooked it all day in the crock pot with a cup of apple cider, then made the balsamic and brown sugar glaze after work to brush over the top. Will and I both loved it.




Red lobster biscuits at home. I made these to go with salmon one night. The taste was almost exactly the same, but the texture was a little off. I would definitely make them again though.



Lastly, I don't have a picture, but I made "meat loaf muffins" using Rachel Ray's recipe here:
meat loaf muffins (the only change was I used oats instead of bread crumbs).
They're a little different from other meatloaf's I've made in that it used ground beef and pork, and the mixture went into a muffin tin instead of a loaf pan to make little individual servings. Super delicious! I've made them twice now, and will probably always follow this recipe now.



So there's a little bit of what I've been up to in the kitchen. My nearly-month long blog break has me itching to work on a project, so I'm off to see what I can come up with. I might even blog again before the weekend is over!




2 comments:

Kristine. said...

Mmm, I've tried the balsamic glazed pork before and I used way more brown sugar than called for, but it was SO yummy. Did you get a lot of splash back from the fried chicken?

Jessica said...

not too much. It's not really deep frying, but pan frying, so there isn't a deep layer of oil to splash. I used olive oil so towards the end as it got hotter it was spitting a little bit, but we have this neat screen pan cover from ikea that we usually use for bacon. that helped!