Since we don't normally stay up very late, especially now with fatigue setting in around 7:30p...haha...we opted for a nice quiet night in, just the 2.3 of us. The evening involved cooking and games...yes, games...and fun drinks.
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| non-alcoholic for T |
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| a good tasty brew for A |
Bacon Wrapped Goat Cheese Stuffed Dates-
We've made these a zillion times, but they are just so good that we couldn't resist making them again. This time I read a trick online for stuffing the dates. Cut your dates length wise on one side, then stuff with the goat cheese. This way you keep your sanity while stuffing & make less mess. We also pre bake the bacon just slightly to make it easier to wrap and allow for less cooking time on the grill (read as: you won't burn your dates). When you wrap them up with bacon the goodness stays inside. These were tossed on the grill...yum.
FYI: Best we have ever made.
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| pre-grilling |
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| post-grilling/pre-eating |
Olive, Caper & Caramelized Onion Baked Brie-
Saw an olive and baked brie dish from
Eclectic Recipes and decided to do a very rough take on it. I wish I would have remembered the phyllo dough when I made my trip to the grocery store. This is "semi-homemade" as we used a Pillsubury crescent dough instead...as we have done in the past. We caramelized onions and mixed up some capers, green olives w/pimento and green olives stuffed w/garlic. We threw this mix on top of the brie and wrapped it all up in our crescent dough (Crescent dough is really hard to use for this recipe...we've used other doughs in the past which is a better idea. The crescent dough wanted to rip because of the perforations).
FYI: The crescent dough turned out to work really well and stayed together during the baking process. The olive caper mix wasn't as salty as expected once cooked with everything else.
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| olive/caper mix |
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| caramelized onions added |
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| all wrapped up & ready to bake |
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| nice & toasty |
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| oh so good |
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| and oozy |
Honey Mustard Salmon-
Andy whipped up a marinade yesterday afternoon and the salmon was vacuum sealed for a few hours. The marinade was made from the following yummy ingredients, in no particular quantity and no particular order:
- Polish mustard
- Agave
- Maple syrup
- Dash of brown sugar
- Sage & thyme
- Salt & pepper to taste
- Fresh squeezed orange juice
- Dash of malt vinegar
This went on the Weber until done. FYI: super good.
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| the picture doesn't do this justice |
Cookie Cake Pie-
Since being pregnant Andy has promised to make me this. It was said that it would be made when I had some sort of major craving. Well, I haven't had any major cravings, so this is one of my Christmas presents from A. Our version of this was also "semi-homemade" style. It included an Oreo crust, Pillsbury chocolate chip cookie dough and a Duncan Hines Super Moist Chocolate Fudge cake mix, topped with whip cream (because frosting would just be "TOO MUCH"...haha).
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| the ingredients |
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| the chef |
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| layer one- Oreo crust |
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| layer two |
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| chocolate chip cookie dough |
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| layer three |
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| dark chocolate cake mix |
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| ready to bake |
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| baked |
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| ready to eat |
We had extra cookie dough and cake mix and just couldn't bear to throw it away, so we made some cupcakes! oh so good also...
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| cookie dough added first |
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| then some cake batter |
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| in the oven they go-sorry no final pics for this one... |
Then we played games & watched movies:
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| we ended up only playing Mad Gab |
Happy New Year from the Three of us!
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