Last post for awhile!

I leave for school in nine days (NINE DAYS!!!!) so this will be my last post for awhile. :-(
However, this means I don’t have to cook for myself anymore! :-D

My first time making a coke ham. SO GOOD! Throw an onion and a ham in a pot with a bottle of dark soda, and voila! Dinner!
 
Extra delicious with special orange juice-brown sugar BBQ sauce!
 
These, my friend, are cake cookies. Haven’t heard of cake cookies, you say? Neither had I, until my wonderful sister made them for me. AHHH! I screamed. WHAT IS THIS GOODNESS?

Why, it’s a cake cookie. A funfetti cake cookie, to be exact.
How? You need one box of cake mix, 2 eggs, and 1/3 cup of oil. Bake at 375 degrees for ten minutes and YOU will go straight to your happy place, as the Ovaltine rabbit would say. Hurray!

Here we have a crab potato puff. Bizarre sounding, but SO nummy! It’s basically deliciously dill-y flavored mashed potatoes with crab chunks. Yum!
 
Our pretty table :-)

Ingredients

      2 cups mashed potatoes
      1 cup fat-free sour cream
      1 Tbsp. Old Bay Seasoning
      1 tsp. dill week
      1 tsp. onion powder
      4 large eggs
      8 ounces "sea legs/fake crab"

Directions
Mix the mashed potatoes, sour cream, seasoning and eggs until smooth and creamy. Fold in the sea legs/fake crab.
Place into a cold oven and then turn on to 350 degrees. Bake 45 minutes.
It will be puffy and still kind of mushy. Let sit 5 minutes then serve hot.

Goodbye for now!

-Lexi

Antique spices

This is the tin of cloves I was having trouble with here. It’s so cute though! There’s a little handwritten label on top, and my mom told me she put that on for my grandmother in high school. Yikes!

 

She told me Red Owl is long gone. I’d never heard of it, anyway.

As of last night, this is no longer in our spice drawer – thank goodness. It has found a new home with some decorative jars above the stove.

Technorati Tags: Cloves,Red Owl

Asian Stir Fry… mmmmm :-)

We had some easy Asian stir-fry dinner in the freezer, and I’d been wanting to make it forever, so I finally cooked it up last night! I added ground ginger like the package suggested, and canned turkey (it would have been wayyyy too much work to thaw out chicken, y’know) and chopped up cabbage and made instant rice to go with it. It was great!

It also suggested putting shredded coconut on top. I did.
OBSESSION!!!
It was divine!

And I am totally having the leftovers for supper tonight.

Anyway, after supper last night I ran to Walmart, since I have money again… and this little book had jumped out at me when I was there earlier this week with Abby. Isn’t it beautiful??? It’s the called the Ideal Book – cleverest of clever! I’m in love!

I’m SO excited to fill this up with a million notes and lists and plans!

It was only about $3, in case you were wondering. And there are matching folders and notebooks, too. I checked. :-D

Technorati Tags: Asian,stir-fry,cabbage,ginger,red bell pepper,pea pods,shredded coconut,canned turkey

My kinda burger :-D

I love boca burgers. Love love love. But I’m not always good at cooking them. Either they are burnt, or by the time I get ketchup and mustard on they are cold. But THIS ONE! This one was muy perfecto! (I may be mixing languages there… or making words up. Who knows.) Add on a slice of American rice cheese, organic ketchup, play connect the dots with mustard, slap a flat bun on top (I’m obsessed with flat buns – I think we get Sara Lee and one other brand around here. Whole grain, of course, because multigrain is evil and corn-bearing) and you have got a MEAL!

I was going to have this yummy-looking spinach, too… until I realized it did not smell so yummy. Sick. 

Technorati Tags: Spinach,Boca burger,Organic ketchup,Flat bun

Chicken a la Lexi

I used to eat Chicken a la King at Bible school, and I LOVED it. Favorite meal hands down. I was SO excited when I found a recipe for it in Fitness! I tweaked it (read: totally changed it) and it was mmmmmmmmmmmmmm… really good.

My mess… :-)

The recipe, sort of.

YUMMY red bell peppers!

  First sautéing the onions…

 

Then lots more veggies! I threw in everything I could find in the fridge – broccoli, one lonely potato, carrots, and later beans and peas.

 
Then I realized I had forgotten to cook the chicken before (or else I just didn’t, who knows) and fried it fast as I could.

With some flour and the chicken – now it looks right!

The delicious spread!

 

  

Foodz as of late

Supa-scrumptious raspberry rhubarb pie. Sorry, this is not a very appetizing picture. My sister deleted the yummy ones. *angry face*

Mmm… pigout with MASH. rice milk, 2 grilled cheese sandwiches (made with rice cheese and soy butter), grapes, a Jennie O turkey dog, AND two Dove bliss chocolates for dessert! (naughty me!)

 

Another lunch… tuna with various nummy things on a flat bun, with a layer of spinach on either side, and carrots, berries and milk.
 

SO, SO, SO good! This is plain old minute rice with chicken flavoring, tilapia fried in salt and oil, and an amazing salsa – as usual, I don’t have the recipe handy, but it’s made with blueberries, mango, lime juice, cilantro, red onion and red bell pepper. It was HEAVENLY!

This is what most of my lunches look like. Whether it’s a bad or good thing, I’m not sure. Mango, peach (?), red pepper, hot dog, and a tortilla with brown sugar melted inside.
 

Love my coffee, granola, yogurt and blueberries :-)
 

Florida!

Mom and I went to Florida last weekend for my early orientation for school, and it was WONDERFUL! I took lots of food pictures, so here they are!

Well, this isn't food... I took lots of cloud pictures too. I LOVE clouds!

Mom and I on the way!

Literally, it was a sea of clouds!

Our feast one night - Domino's, pepperoni and olives with cheese on 1/2, strawberries, triscuits (lo and behold, they have started making these very simply - nothing but wheat, salt and oil, which means I can eat them! Hurray!), oreo sticks (regular oreos have both corn syrup and corn starch in them, but these just have corn starch, which I am pretty lenient on. I was all, YES! Dessert!) and of course diet pop - caffeine free for Mom and a wake-me-up for me!

Me at a FABULOUS place in Lakeland. It's called Harry's, and we got chicken rice jambalaya (allergen-free!) and Eggplant Crabcake Napoleon (or something like that). THAT wasn't very good for me, but it definitely tasted good :-D

I went a little crazy on this trip - I wanted to just enjoy myself while we were eating out every day, so I took benadryl every night and hoped for the best. And it really wasn't too bad! I ate at Cracker Barrel for the first time. It was AMAZZZZZING. Chicken dumplings with breaded okra, carrots and green beans! I'm sure the dumplings had milk or eggs or cornstarch, or all of the above, but I didn't even get a stomachache - YES! Sadly, my only picture of that feast is on my phone, and I'm not really smart enough to get pictures off my phone yet...

My first Dunkin' Donuts! Pret-ty sure that donut wasn't Lexi-approved, but it was good!

Our lunch in the airport. I know ALL HOT DOG BUNS ON THE FACE OF THE EARTH have eggs, but I was hungry and pressed for options so I ate it anyway. I can't say much for the giant hotdog, but the peach mango smoothie was DELICIOUS!

My snack on the way home - to my surprise, these ginger snaps were actually really good. Not only that, they were made without any sort of milk, whey, milk powder, eggs, corn syrup, cornstarch, dextrose, or maltodextrin! Wow! Add in diet coke and my puzzle book and I was one happy girl!

Tofu soup and a cute dog

Here is my terrible mismatched rice. I smell a casserole experiment in my future.

So, instead of rice, I put spaghetti noodles in with my tofu, cabbage, onion, celery and peas.

I threw in some minced garlic and ground basil as well, and it was actually pretty good!

It needed more salt or something, though. *Sigh*

Yum!

And for your viewing pleasure... our cute little intellectual!

The Ham: Part II

I made my second ham last night. Ehhh... it wasn't nearly as good as the first. Same recipe as before, but this time I added some ground cloves because it said to put whole cloves in my diamond slices on the surface of the ham - and I couldn't get the container open. It was a bad idea - it also tasted too mustardy, so I wonder if last time I only used half what it called for and forgot?

I guess we ate the pig's butt... ew.

Oh, well. It was still pretty good. :-D

My mess.

Mmmm!

The brown-sugary sauce - WAY too much, and I couldn't even taste the orange juice over the MUSTARD. And the CLOVES. Emphasis on the 'MUSTARD' and 'CLOVES'.

Ham ham ham. I used my camera for some of these pictures and stole my sister's for others, that is why there is such a difference in quality. *Sigh* One day when I am rich I will have a nice camera... hah.

Today I had my FAV for breakfast, Cascadian Farms granola with blueberries and rice milk. And cinnamon sugar cookie coffee! NUM!

For lunch I had PB&J, fruit and veggies with my nanny kids. And a soy milk "Kidz Dream Smoothie". They are a little weird, but not bad. My nanny mom loves me, she stocked up on Almond Milk! I don't think it was for me specifically, but still... :-)

For a snack, this afternoon I've eaten an apricot, an orange, and a piece of fudgesicle pie. Technically it is a frozen pudding pie, but it becomes like a Fudgesicle - SO good! I forget that rice milk won't set in pudding, so when I make this dumb mistake, I have to freeze it and make fudgesicles or pie. The pudding mix has some cornstarch, but no milk = happy Lexi!

I also made cookies with the kids - we used whole wheat flour. I said BLECH, but the kids liked it. They say they like everything, though, so I don't trust them. Cookies aren't supposed to taste healthy ;-) Tomorrow we will frost them and then I hope they will be better!

So, needless to say, I took in some egg and butter this afternoon... can't not sample dough and warm cookies, even if it does taste really... whole.

Tonight I'm going to use up my tofu, and kind of do what I did the other night - tofu, soy sauce, and veggies, but this time I'm making it in soup form! I'm excited!