My Monsieur

This pleasant sandwich is something that I love to make on the weekends. It's sort of a variation on the basic croque-monsieur idea. I use quality sourdough (I get mine from the Central Market bakery), smoked ham, and mozzarella. Add to that a little fresh ground black pepper and dried rosemary and it sends me over the moon. I generously butter my sourdough slices, top slice with mozzarella, sprinkle with pepper and rosemary, layer several slices of ham, and top with the second slice of bread. Toast over medium-high heat on each side, let set just a moment once it's done so that you can slice it without the cheese sliding too much, and then just enjoy.

Easy Weekend Eats

With all the holiday hubbub we hadn't done it in awhile, but this weekend we returned to one of our favorite fast dinner fixes- pizza. Hopefully someday I'll get the knack of bread dough. But until that day I just cheat and use the Pillsbury kind. Maybe I'll check the freezer section at Central Market next time I'm there for something a bit snazzier. Anyway, the Pillsbury dough is what makes this dinner so darn fast. Josh is in charge of greasing the cookie sheet and pressing the dough out, while I get all our toppings ready to go. We always have green olives- always. I love green pepper, and if I have any surplus onion sitting around I'll use that too. Lately we've been crazy about pepperoni, not a big surprise, but sometimes we do chicken or go without meat altogether. Once I've got all our individual topping preferences laid out on each of our pizza halves I top the whole thing with a layer of raw spinach leaves, a sprinkling of feta, and finish it off with mozzarella. It's only 6 minutes in the oven once the toppings are added and we're ready to chow down. Josh likes to top his slices with Parmesan before chomping them up. I prefer the occasional dash of red pepper flakes. A tasty dinner, perfect for easy relaxed movie nights. And we get to make it together, which I definitely consider a bonus.

Catch-up and Weekend Plans

Well, this week I was forced into some simplistic cooking. I hadn't gotten all the ingredients I needed for one meal, and the heavy rains made it darn near impossible to get to the store. So I had to shuffle some recipes around and come up with some quick substitutes. Wednesday night I didn't have anything planned since the weather caused such upheaval, so I threw together a super fast, super easy, and definitely not all that healthy meal. I have a myriad of boxed products in the pantry, remnants from the days that dinner equaled some meat on the foreman grill, a canned veg in the microwave, and either another veg or one of those boxes. Now, while these meals weren't anything impressive, they were incredibly fast. Often times all I needed was 10 minutes and we'd be ready to eat. I have to say that sometimes I wish things were still that easy, and I got my wish Wednesday night. I had half a package of turkey sausage leftover from the jambalaya I made Monday evening. I heated that through and served it with canned green beans, canned corn, and instant mashed potatoes. Yes, I said instant. Confession time: I have so much trouble peeling potatoes that I used to buy instant all the time. Now I just keep the skins on them and pretend I do it solely for nutrition, ha.

Last night I was going to heat up some vegetable marinara I had pulled from the freezer the day before. For whatever reason though, all day long I kept thinking about buttery, garlicky, spaghetti totally sans sauce. When I got home and peered at the watery looking sauce that came forth from the fridge, I knew I wanted it even less. So, I opted to melt 4 tablespoons butter in a saucepan, and heat 2 pressed cloves of garlic with plenty of cracked black pepper. It was so yummy, not to mention incredibly cheap! I used my .25 cent package of made-in-Mexico spaghetti, and I'm not gonna bother to do the math on how much half a stick of butter and 2 garlic cloves cost, but I'm pretty darn sure it's not much.

This weekend I've got lots of plans. I'll be grocery shopping after work and I'm hoping to toss together a pizza tonight before Josh runs off to band practice and I work on organizing the pantry. Tomorrow morning I'm hoping to try out a recipe from a blog I just found this week. Saturday night we've got a dinner date with Steph and Rodney. Steph and I are going to go shopping for our ingredients and cook together, and the boys of course will do the dishes! Lastly I am really hoping to find time to make some granola on Sunday. I hope my weekend is as productive as I'm making it sound. And I hope you guys have a great weekend too!