I'm Back!

For those who don't know, Jason and I were married on August 13!

It was a wonderful, beautiful and time consuming wedding. My mind was full of seating plans, dresses and decorations for the past few months. Now that things are settling down, my mind is migrating back to home cooking and relaxing dinners that compliment an evening glass of wine.  Let's jump right into tonights dinner:

With a lack of protein in the freezer, I dug right down into the bottom and found these 6 frozen drumsticks. This is a recipe that I pieced together with some produce from the garden and some pantry staples.


Drumstick Skillet
6 frozen drumsticks (defrost & remove skin)
dab of butter (olive oil would work as well if you're avoiding dairy)

fresh green beans
1 pepper (sliced)
1 tomato (sliced)

1 cup rice
2 cups water
mixture of spices (kosher salt, fresh ground pepper, ground oregano)

1. Heat butter in skillet. Brown all sides of the chicken drumsticks and set aside
2. Add vegetables, rice, water and spice to skillet. Bring to a boil.
3. Put drumsticks on top of vegetables and rice and cover. Let simmer for approx. 25 minutes.

This was a great dish! I let it cook a little too long and the rice was stuck to the bottom but the vegetables and chicken were cooked perfectly.

Here's a taste of a few of the things I've been cooking lately and will blog about in the near future:

 Sweet potato fries made in our brand new Actifry (details to come).

Jello vodka shots made for a summer BBQ party.

Skillets

Since our camping trip to Jasper had to be canceled *due to SNOW*, I had most of the ingredients already gathered to make an Italian Sausage Skillet. It was inspired by, but not exactly the same as this camping recipe I had made last year. I used orange pepper, red onion and no zucchini this time. It was not as good cooked on the stove as compared to over the open fire. Still, it was tasty and fairly simple to throw together. It was such a colorful dish.. purple and orange! The picture doesn't do it justice.

This morning I threw together a breakfast skillet of my own creation. Here's what was in it:

a little dot of margarine
chopped red onion
frozen hash browns
2 eggs
chopped spinach
fresh ground pepper

I sauteed it all up together and put a cheese curd on top. It was an odd choice of topping, I know,  and not exactly something I would recommend. Jason thought it was butter. Perhaps next time I will just eat the cheese curd on it's own.

Camping Food!

We're home from the mountains! I said goodbye to an old friend on this trip ...

I also took some camping food pictures and tried a few new recipes in the woods this time. Here's the usual breakfast ...

Cooked by Jason:

For lunch one day, we had burgers (veggie on the left, beef right) and melted some gruyere cheese on top. That was pretty good!

Dinner on the last night was SUPER good. I just took a picture of the recipe in the book to save me from typing it all out. Click on the picture to blow it up and it's readable.

 

Cooking over the fire

All done!

This was such a good meal - we have leftovers tonight! The zucchini was from my garden and tomato from my moms garden. I pre-cooked the chicken sausage at home just to make sure it was fully cooked.

And finally, dessert!

 

 

 Delicious! This could have easily been done with canned fruit as well. Lots of different options with that recipe.