Buffalo chicken dip

In the Food Processor: 10 oz can of chicken (drained), a block of cream cheese, half a cup of sour cream, some ranch dressing, a whole bunch of Frank's Red Hot Original. Serve cold or put it in a baking dish and heat in the oven until browned on top. Best with honey wheat pretzel sticks!

Happy New Year!

Sunday freezer cooking

Coconut red curry chicken with spinach and cilantro

Chicken Alfredo with spinach and broccoli

Cilantro lime chicken with corn and black beans

Black bean taco soup

Roasted acorn squash seeds

Tony's, a little garlic powder, brown sugar and EEVO

Sunday breakfast

Fancy breakfast. Cornbread muffins with honey. Bacon with pepper. Salted tomatoes with sour cream and wheat germ. Eggs, turkey, and asparagus with homemade hollandaise sauce: three egg yolks, hot melted butter, Dijon mustard, Tabasco, lemon juice.

Baking spree

I got a new sideboard table for the kitchen which means I never have to put my cake dome back in the box. Spooky green cupcakes for Nate's birthday and my special peanut butter butter cake for Dannielle's birthday.

Hash brown egg casserole

With bacon and onions! It's kind of like a Spanish omelette but with hash browns (homemade!) and sriracha.

Swiss vineyard paradise

Grocery store near the Italy/Switzerland border. 

When you pick out your produce... 

... you weight it. Thank god for the pictures.

Lunch on the go with Super and Augie...

Sandwiches on top of the Europcar. 

At the foot of the Alps in Switzerland.
Dinner was a success! A campfire, hotdogs, salads, and Swiss wine!!

The Flying Chamberlinis.

This morning: juice, bread and nutella, bananas, sausage...

Breakfast bar on the vineyard wall. 

Camp-cooking & grocery shopping in Italy

A quick post about my travels! We're on day 4 of a 21 day journey from Genoa, Italy to Gothenberg, Sweden. I've got six people and a baby to feed everyday, and I'm definitely still learning what the heck and how the heck to feed these people on a budget. We have two camp stoves but ran out of fuel, so we bought a new butane/propane burner we may get to test today. -- But I think we'll be moving away from  camp-cooking like a hobos and more towards cold cuts and canned foods... 

A mess! Probably illegal!

Italian grocery store experiences:

The Little Old Man Who Could Not Read says, "This looks like milk, I think."

Sup amused by the tiny Italian Cokes.

The strongest espresso I've ever had. In Alessandria, Italy. 

Italian pizza

The European adventure has started! There haven't been any great adventures with food yet here in Fado, Italy, but I get to try some authentic Italian pizza.

Mmm, prosciutto.

[Awww, I owe you a photo of pizza. Slow connection. Many apologies.]

Cali's

I'll say this: I'm surprised the reviews on Google for Cali's aren't better. It's one of my favorite places. They've got great lo mein, delicious big bowl soups, and the "pan-Asian" fare like cashew chicken or whatever.

I had a streak of ordering the almond chicken (ugh, perfectly roasted almond slicesss), but I almost always go with the tofu lo mein. Might not be the best tofu, but it's fast, full of veggies, and they'll make it real-spicy for you instead of just Minnesota-spicy.

And, yeah, the greenhouse dining area is tacky and weird -- well so am I! It's in my neighborhood, and everybody that works there is really nice and remembers me. Last time I went, they didn't even give me a menu; she knew I wasn't gonna look at it anyway. Plus they switched to really nice chopsticks... but then again they got rid of the Chinese zodiac placemats. Still my favorite!

Why are woks so expensive?! Want: Scanpan CTX Nonstick Wok with Rack and Sticks, 12.75 inch - 12.75"

Mostly I just wanted to post that picture of me because I think it's funny. A little bit cross-eyed, mouth open like ALWAYS -- but I look badass eating with chopsticks.

Yakisoba -- More like YUMISOBA

Today I went to the Midwest's largest Asian grocery store, United Noodles. I should have taken photos there because it was vast and beautiful, but I'm pretty sure I was already embarrassing my friend Joey by acting like such a tourist. 


Joey talked me into buying some yakisoba noodles. The ease-speed/delicious ratio for these noodles with this sauce is off the charts. While the bacon was cooking, I chopped up some cabbage and green onions. The yakisoba noodles are already cooked, so it really was as easy as opening the package and frying them  in the bacon fat, adding some yakisoba sauce and tossing in the cabbage, green onions, and bean sprouts. 

Decorate with sriracha and ho-lee crap delicious:

ps - Look how pretty the pictures are! Love my tiny new Canon PowerShot ELPH 320 HS. 

Cooking in Europe on a bike (sort of)

I will have a very unique cooking challenge on my plate (GET IT?) in just a month: I'll be traveling for three weeks from Milan to Gothenberg, cooking for five adults and a baby with naught more than a camping stove. My sister Haley and her husband Rob are going to be biking that route with their friends Jonas and Louis. I will be in the car with their baby!

In preparation, I've started learning vegetable names in German. (I'm a wordnerd; have you seen my other blog?) Here are the cutest:

• der Kohl (cabbage, like "coleslaw"
• der Blumenkohl (cauliflower, lit. flower cabbage)
• der Rosenkohl (brussel sprouts, lit. rose cabbages)
• der Broccoli (I'll give you one guess.) 

And I purchased a new camera! This little point-and-shoot guy will be in my pocket capturing the grocery stores, farmers' markets, and restaurants on the adventure -- as well as a lot of shots of one cute kid, my nephew August.

You can expect some videos to be posted from the trip, as well as maybe some fancy videos to be posted after (have you seen this? Rob made it).

Is it weird that I'm really excited to have a decent camera again because I want to take pictures of food? This blog will get a whole lot prettier in just a week or so when it arrives. I've been making do with the craptacular camera on my dinky QWERTYslide middleschooler's phone. Now that the trip to Europe is actually happening, I'm regretting having only gotten 16GB of memory because it was on sale... I really should have sprung for this one: Transcend 32GB Class 4 microSDHC Flash Memory Card - TS32GUSDHC4.)

In the meantime, here is a crappy photo of some delicious chicken cabbage tacos I made last week. Chicken and onion, carrots, cucumber, and cilantro wrapped up in cabbage leaves with a red curry peanut butter sauce. 

Don't waste it!

I've been really into NOT THROWING ANY FOOD AWAY EVER. And two really great things have come of this: homemade broth, and (TMI) I'm really regular. More on that in a minute.

So all that stuff you usually throw away -- broccoli stalks; the thick ends of asparagus; the stems and edges of bell peppers, onions, carrots; the stems and stalks from kale and cilantro and dill and parsley; the outside leaves of lettuce and cabbage; the slimy spinach at the bottom of the bag -- all that is good stuff!! To assuage my guilt at throwing away perfectly edible food that I had paid good money for, I used to made pickled broccoli medallions (ehhh), but I've recently realized two greater ends for these means. 

1. Homemade broth! 

Seen below is my homemade broth. It's reddish because I usually cheat a little with bouillon cube and Sazon Goya, but it's made of all the ends of stuff that I put in a bag and freeze until there's enough to make a pot of broth. You can of course make this vegetarian, but if you're good with your timing and you've got, say, the picked over leftover bones from an emergency grocery-store rotisserie chicken -- that there would be dee-licious too. 

2. Green ice cubes!

(This is the TMI part) -- If you're a shake person like me, green ice cubes are the perfect use for all those extra bits -- EXCEPT ONIONS, believe me. Leave out the onion bits for green ice cubes. But talk about a serious way to get extra nutrients and stay regular, especially if you're into Brassica oleracea -- that is broccoli, kale, califlower. They're all the same species, and they all make you gassy. The good spin on it is that if you're ever not regular and you wanna fix that, juice away and take a fresh shot. Guaranteed that by morning you'll be feeling right as rain and totally empty. 

So because I usually store up a bunch of ends and bits until I have enough that makes it worth my time to get out the juicer, I bought a couple of extra ice cube trays so I can make green ice cubes with all the juice. They're not always green -- one time we just had too many carrots by accident so I juiced the ones that were on their way out, so the cubes were actually orange. 

I also have one more spare ice cube tray that I use for all little bit of coffee at the bottom of the pot every morning. Those coffee ice cubes are great in coffee, Bailey's, ice cream, and morning shakes depending on the flavor (peanut butter banana chocolate coffee shake, anyone?). 


With all this beautiful smashed up vegetable pulp, one of my goals for this summer is to get on board with composting. 


Ps, will someone please buy me this Cooking With Calphalon 9-Pc. Utensil Set?? kthx. Also this: 

Pumpkin pasties with Harry Potter

Well, this is about the time that I stopped posting in this blog, our housewarming party from October a year and a half ago. The Hubz's birthday is in October, so I went a little overboard for the party making foods out of The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook that I bought for myself for early-Christmas.

It's pretty fun because it references the exact page from each of the Harry Potter books that each food is mentioned on. It even takes the nerdy leap to make inferences about what particularly was served when the book is a little vague. So that time when Sirius sent Harry a birthday cake that was delivered by a toucan? Well, we can assume it was something tropical, right? So Dinah gives us a recipe for pineapple-upside-down cake. It just tickles all my nerd bones.

And what the heck IS treacle tart? I mean, I know it's Harry's favorite dessert. And I know it's Cockney rhyming slang for "sweetheart." But the word "treacle" misleadingly gross-sounding for a pie made of syrup and lemon. Yum!

So for our big party I made PUMPKIN PASTIES, little hotpockets of pumpkin and sugar:

I also made sugar mice with my first ever fondant. (I'm really sad that I can't find a picture because I spent a couple of hours molding this little mice with my bare hands, but this was a year ago.) We also had pumpkin juice -- which got spiked into RUMpkin juice. Can't go wrong there.

Chipotle pork tacos

Hey, I remember this blog! I've got a LOT of pictures of food that I can post. So I think I'll try and do that, and maybe someone will think it's cool. 

I got a new phone with a crappy camera, so the photos will suck more. I'm working on getting a new digital camera. 

I also have a new blog: All Things Wordy. Check it out if you like words.

This is a chipotle pork taco with pickled red onions, cabbage and sour cream. 

The pork was a leftover crockpot tenderloin, shredded and sauteed with chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. 

Pickled red onions are really easy and delicious. Just slice some onions, put them in the fridge with some red wine vinegar and water. They only need to "pickle" for ten minutes before they taste delicious.

Actually, all of it was delicious.