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What Home Depot Is Good For

I wish I had gotten more.

What is Home Depot good for, you ask? Well, when your mom is deciding to paint her Urban Kitchen the color of a bar of chocolate and you fear it will make the room look like a cave, Home Depot is good for collecting color samples. Lots of color samples. I wish I had gotten more. However, mom was starting to give me an angry look when I started pulling green shades, when obviously that color was not going into her kitchen.

As I was pulling colors of Behr, I remembered that I could use some of the shades to make craft project. Shush. You know you’ve thought of it, too. It wasn’t like I was taking enough to make a wall mural, just enough to make a few card cut outs. You’ll see. I’ll be posting those soon.

Oh yeah, and in case you were as worried as I was about the kitchen color, I got her to brighten up the shade. I think we went with something called Mushroom Bisque. How appropriate for a kitchen color. Food on the wall prevails – savory over sweet.

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Food, Savory

Birthday Stromboli

Okay, so stromboli is not just for birthdays. It just so happens that my mom and I used to make it a lot and I thought, for her birthday, that it might be nice to make it for her again. I may have traveled 1,300 miles to celebrate with her. Anyway, back to the stromboli. Unlike a calzone, I do NOT put pizza sauce in, nor do I put tomato in it at all. Sooo, with that said, I opted to make my famed stromboli. nom nom

Gathered troops. Note the onion, green pepper, mushrooms, shaved beef from the deli, and american cheese. There’s pizza dough involved as well.

First of all, you must get the oven preheated to 350. While that’s getting all nice and toasty, get a frying pan going with some olive oil. In that, cook up some diced green pepper and slices of onion. Cook it through on medium until the onion is cooked through. I added a half pound of the shaved beef to the pan and kicked up the heat a hair to get the pan hot.

While I had been handed a glass of Moscato wine (that’s a sweet white wine), before I took a sip, I may have dropped a few drops into the pan to keep the meat moist. When that cooked off a bit, I was dropping in the mushrooms. Cooked those through.

Cookin’ up some goodness.

Then I went looking for a rolling pin to roll out the dough. But, being at my mom’s house, a normal rolling pin wouldn’t exactly be found in her kitchen. So I found this random beauty in a drawer…

What kind of rolling pin is this??

It looks like some sort of weird futuristic kitchen device. Why do you need two ends to a rolling thingy?

Anyway, I layered on some American cheese and then started scooping on the filling.

Filling it up!

I may have gone overboard and overfilled it, but I pulled the dough over and then cut a few little holes in the top of the dough to let it breathe. Bake for 25 minutes or until the top is browned.

Will be super hot when it comes out. As much as you want to eat it now, let it cool for 8 minutes.

I wanted to eat the whole thing myself. That’s probably a bad idea.

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Food, Savory

Easy Mushroom Rice

Okay, I might have gotten lazy on this one. Went to the gym with my roomie and said I wanted rice for dinner. I’ve been on this no meat kick, and somehow started eating mushrooms. Also, I’m finding it’s easier to make food when I don’t have to wait for chicken to cook all the way through or the meat to stop mooing. So I decided to make dinner… easy rice from a bag. But apparently that wasn’t good enough. Seemed like I had to at least pretend I was going to cook…

This is the final product. A delicious mass of ricey goodness.

So I started with dicing up the last of the onion in the fridge, about a quarter of an onion, maybe a little less. Tossed that in a pan with olive oil to caramelize the onions. Right at the end, I added about a quarter cup of chopped mushrooms to the pan to cook them through. In another pan, I made this:

See what I meant about easy rice….

Cooked the rice through, then tossed in the onions and mushrooms. Delicious!

nom nom nom

 

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Food, Sweet

Peanut Butter Cheesecake Bites

So I was offered up the proposal to either go to the gym and work out, or stay at home, drink wine, and make dessert. Take one guess what I opted to do.

It tastes way better than it looks, I promise.

Ingredients:
2 1/2 cups graham cracker crumbs
3/4 cup butter, melted
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1 cup  chocolate chips
1 tablespoon creamy peanut butter
2 pkgs. (8 oz. each) cream cheese, softened (I used one regular and one reduced fat package)
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
4 large eggs

Preheat the oven to 325. (At this point, we opened a bottle of wine, best decision of the night). However, you should probably combine the graham cracker crumbs, butter, and 1/4 cup of sugar. Put 1/2 cup of the mixture on the side, press the rest into the bottom of the baking pan. I used a 9 x 13 inch pan (the beauty that I use to make my awesome lasagna.)

Making the crumby base.

Then we proceeded to mix in another bowl the following: softened cream cheese, rest of the sugar, flour, and vanilla extract.  Add eggs one at a time, mix until smooth. We didn’t have an electric mixer, so it took a while. But the workout is worth it. Beat in the peanut butter and fold in the chocolate chips. Pour in baking dish, crumble the rest of the graham cracker mix on the top of the cream cheese mixture.

Bake 25 to 30 minutes, or until set. Let cool, then refrigerate. Believe me, it was delicious. And let it cool, because we didn’t at first (because we were so eager to eat it), that it wasn’t as good as it was cool.

Yum!

Yum, yum!

I sprinkled a bit of sugar on top of the bars after I cut them. Gave them a bit of an extra bite.

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