Ice cream sandwich for dinner, Dove bar for dessert

Picture if you will....I am in the kitchen mixing and measuring and then IT happens!  Hubby comes walking in from the garage and he is not alone, nope he has company.  It is company that I know and they are not welcome, not at all!  I hear that familiar crinkle, the noise that this company makes.  Hubby has brought home, get ready for it, four grocery bags from John Brooks!  WHY I screeched....why did you do this?  We are FOUR days in and YOU have blown the no buy for February challenge.  Hubby says, but...I cut him off saying I have been working hard in the kitchen all day prepping and using what is on hand to make meals for the week, and four days in, you have groceries???!!!  Hubby says that he stopped to buy some BBQ sauce that his friend makes and is finally in the stores, a long 7 years later.  I can understand supporting your friend, and Hubby REALLY supported him with 8 bottles of the BBQ sauce.  Then like a kid at Christmas, proceeds to show me what else he bought:  


1. We have a box full of 20 individually wrapped Dallas Cowboy plastic silverware sets, napkin included and big blue Cowboy star on the plastic wrap of each set of silverware.  AND they are not even in the Superbowl this Sunday!


2. 2 plastic jars of Clamato juice.  


3. A six pack of hot and spicy V8.  Makes perfect sense, as the 42 cans of V8 that we have on hand are not the hot and spicy kind and the 8 jars of Hot Sauce could not remedy that situation....UGH


4. 2 packs of 100 count paper plates.  WHY?  Because you can't use the foam ones in the microwave.  I had these hidden in the back of a cabinet  from another foray to the store on his own.


5. A box of ice cream sandwiches.  We have no ice cream in the house says hubby.  I open freezer and point to a 1/2 gallon right there and in a voice a tad high pitched say we have the ice cream maker that I got for Christmas just waiting to be used.  Oh I forgot he says.  This is were my right eye starts to twitch.


6. A box of Dove bars.  We are apparently on the verge of an ice cream shortage and needed to stock up.  


7. A produce bag with 6 Roma tomatoes.


I am fuming, getting ready to put the last thing in the oven when Hubby says what's for Dinner, I'm starving?  I say that we are having baked potatoes with broccoli and cheese, a steak, and a salad.  For dessert there will be peach cobbler or the applesauce cake.  I open the oven door to slide my dishes in and to check on the potatoes that I have in there.  I stop mid slide!  The oven is not working, it is warm at best!  I can touch the racks in there and not have to move my hand.  This is NOT good!  My eye is twitching away.  I am close to tears, looking at all the contraband on the counter and my 4 dishes to go in the oven.  Hubby says he will take a look, so I gladly leave the kitchen and come sit at my laptop.


There is banging, and moving and cussing, and banging , and metal scraping metal.  I am taking comfort in the tap tap tap of my nails on the keys of my laptop, while trying to block out the fiasco in the kitchen. Hubby asks me if I spilled anything on the stove top that would prevent the gas from coming thru and being lit. Really?  He then turns down the heat in the house thinking that it wont light due to the temp in the house.  For real?  He then tells me that it is the pot of water I have on the stove top, it has to cool.  OK, it should be cool, that was 7 hours ago.  Oh really he says.  We have both tried to warm up the oven for the past hour and we are not achieving our goal.  I am sitting here remembering when we were dating and he told me that there was nothing that he couldn't fix. Well for tonight his name is liar liar, pants on fire, tomorrow he will go back to being Rick.


Long story short...Hubby and son are having steak, on paper plates, and using the plastic silverware, and a plain nuked potato.  They had better use that @#$%^& BBQ sauce!  I, my friends am having an ice cream sandwich for dinner and a Dove bar for dessert!  Screw it!  If you can't beat em, join em!


I am going to wrap up my ooey gooey not cooked yummies and put them in the working fridge and troll on line looking for a new oven with one hand, and an ice cream sandwich in the other! Stay tuned for edge of your seat details...


Tomorrow is another day. AMEN to that!

Cook it once, eat it many times

Well here I am, second day in a row... a new record for me!  I have been taking stock of what I have in the pantry and seeing how I can cook once, use multiple times.  I have pureed tomatoes, diced tomatoes and tomato paste (all organic) and all the spices needed to make a spaghetti sauce that I can use for spaghetti and meatballs, chicken cacciatore and two lasagna's, one veggie and one meat and stuffed green peppers (to use up the cup of brown rice in the fridge).   I plan to at least double this as I am making a few meals based on this sauce. I just found frozen ricotta and mozzarella cheese in the garage freezer and while there, I pulled out some chicken thighs and legs.  I am going to make the "spaghetti" sauce in the crockpot so I do not have to watch it all day.  I have some meatballs in the freezer, so no need to make new and I will just chop up some of them to add to the meat lasagna along with a small piece of sausage I also found in the freezer.  I also saved the pasta water I used at lunch to use again for the lasagna noodles

Meals for Today:

Breakfast: 

There was no breakfast, we slept right thru it!  We got the call yesterday that there was no school again today, so we stayed up really really late and slept really really late!

Lunch:

We were ready for lunch!  I chopped up some carrots, bell peppers, onion, chopped garlic and  threw in some frozen TJ's corn and broccoli.  I sauteed all the veggies in about a T. of olive oil and added some paprika, mustard powder, kosher salt, and balsamic vinegar when it was hot.  I added a little bit of heavy cream and parmesan cheese and let it get thick and then added the pasta along with a little pasta water and it makes a very creamy and yummy sauce.  I always make a bunch of this as I will eat it for a few days.

Dinner:

We have not had dinner yet, my lunch dishes are still all over the counter,  and I am still chewing as I type this.  I have a steak thawed in the fridge and this will be cooked on the grill* outside. I have about 20 lbs of potatoes, so broccoli cheese potatoes seem like a good and yummy choice to add.  I will also use the last of the apple sauce tonight for dinner.  I will eat my pasta made for lunch, a salad with my champagne dijon dressing.

Baked yummies:

Last night I made the Applesauce Cake and this morning there is the equivalent of an applesauce muffin left!  I am going to make another applesauce cake in addition to a Pumpkin one.  I have cans of pumpkin from December that I had planned to use to make pumpkin pies and never got around to it.  I will also make a peach cobbler out of some canned peaches we have since I want to make the best use of the oven while it is baking away.  Hopefully some of this will make it to the freezer before Hoover and Son find them.  Hubby says if food disappears, it was very good and I should take it as a compliment, so I did.

*We grill all year long and have 2 grills, one is Hubby's for all the meat items and the 2nd is mine for fruits, veggies, and veggie burgers.  Yes this may seem a bit odd, however I do not eat anything with a face or a family and cooking my veggies next to a sizzling cow loses its appeal to me.