Today, a random VIDEO!

R?

Jungle Jim's!

This weekend we made a trip to Cincinnati. There were two places we wanted to go. One, Bass Pro Shops. As you have seen before, this is quite often a destination. Second, we were out of Bove's Vodka Sauce. This is not an ad, or paid for in any way by Bove's, but hey, if you want to, you can pay me in free vodka sauce. It is seriously, the best pasta sauce ever. If you've never had vodka sauce before, don't judge it until you try Bove's. If you've had it before but didn't like it? It's because it was a different brand. Seriously, this stuff is awesome. Just the right amount of tomato and cream, with a great spiciness. Wow, I'm almost drooling thinking of it. Maybe we should have ravioli this week.

ANYWAY, we were out of Bove's. It used to be that you could get it just about anywhere. Then it disappeared. Now, it's back, but $6 a bottle at kroger. At Jungle Jim's in Cincinatti, it's $4 a bottle. Yumy savings. So, this and the desire for food insanity took us an hour and a half east. You'll have to pardon the great lack of good pictures throughout this post, as there is a sign on the front door of Jungle Jim's prohibiting photography.

Jungle Jims is like no store you have ever seen. It's like they took all of the grocery stores in a state and smushed them all together. Then gave the unholy creation some steroids. Then set me loose inside the beast. When you walk in, you see a drug store type area, as big as some whole dugstores. As you pass that you are engulfed in the cheese. There is everything. Saturday was sample day, so we tried some goat cheese, and some that was coated in cocoa. I almost bought some baked mozzarella. It looked delicious. Then you can get lost in a liquour store and a half's worth of alcohol, but we went to the bakery. To get there I had to pass every kind of gum ever made. There's a huge meat section, ginormous produce, and then you get to the fish. Some of them are still alive. Swimming about in tanks. Can you get any fresher?

There's a firetruck lording over a house of hot sauce. We got a grenade filled with almost pure capsacin. Then there's the international section. This section is as big as an entire Kroger itself. If you want authentic food from another country, look here. It's really amazing.

Possibly the strangest thing about this place is that after all of that, it's also just a normal grocery store. You can get your hamburger helper, or peanut butter, or milk there too. It's really fun, check out the pictures on their site: http://www.junglejims.com/

There's a ton I've missed. There's too much to write about, so I'll just leave you with one last thing. The first time we went was on a Sunday evening. It was just right. There were so many people there on Saturday, that it was really hard to make your way through. So, think of crowds...

Argh!

I promise I'll be back soon, insanely busy. Nothing huge, just a billion little things...



For now...

Would You Rather Weekend!

Walk through a cemetery alone at night?

or


Swim in a large pond that has snapping turtles in it?


Hmmmmmm...

OMG!!!! RRRRRRR

I realized that in my frenzy to blog every day, I missed random Thursday last week!!!

Tortilla Pizzas!

You may have noticed, around our house, there's a lot of pizza. It's good! It has many major food groups! So, a few weeks ago, we went to the boat sport and travel show. We saw a presentation by the "paddling gourmet". He talks about camp cooking without a cooler, but good. He made all kinds of deliciousness, but one of our favorites was the pizza he made using a flour tortilla. It was really, simple, in a frying pan, and great! So I decided that we should try it ourselves. Now what do I do with any simple recipe? I complicate it. So here's what I did:

I decided that if one kind of tortilla pizza is good, a bunch of kinds are better. I had ingredients for a regular pizza, white pizza, bbq pizza, and buffalo pizza. Here they are:
I hope you also enjoy seeing my lovely kitchen. If you think the color on that wall is bright, you haven't seen the living room.

There was hot sauce, marinara, alfredo and bbq sauce. Once again, I used Famous Dave's rich and sassy.

This was a great way to get rid of all of the little bit of cheese that I had in the fridge. There was an italian blend, 2 cheddar/jack blends, regular mozzarella and regular cheddar.

To go on top we had pepperoni, chicken, green onion, green pepper, celery, red onion, mushrooms and jalapenos. Oh yeah, not pictured are some fried onion strings.

I used a 2 skillet method. Doesn't that sound like I know what I'm doing? I browned the tortilla on one side (some of them got puffy!) and then we put the toppings on that side.

Then We put the tortilla in another skillet with a lid to melt the cheese and cook the toppings a little. I used the 2 skillets so that I could keep things going, but as time wore on, it took a whole lot longer to cook the "pizza" than it did to brown the tortillas. Also there was a little adjustment to prevent burning. The cast iron skillet in which I was browning was on medium heat, and the cooking skillet was on medium low. So that we didn't continue eating standing up in the kitchen, I turned the oven on to warm, and used it to hold the finished ones until the rest were done.


It was really good. Our favorites were the buffalo chicken and the bbq chicken. On the buffalo went hot sauce (we both used meduim) chicken, red onion, celery, mozzarella or italian blend cheese and ranch dressing. On the eaten too quickly to photograph bbq chicken was bbq sauce, chicken, green onion, cheddar cheese, and onion strings. They were great!

New Blog Love

The Omnomicon. I came to it through stumble. Ahh, stumble, I gave you up for lent. This is already very hard. I stumbled on to another blog talking about the Rainbow cake. This piece of fabulousness, I like very much. Then I got further into the site and realized that I want to make almost everything on there. Check it out and see if you don't feel the same.

Seed Update

HI!
I'm a beefsteak tomato seedling! You can just call me Bob. I'm here to show you all that while growth has slowed down a little, we still have new friends all the time!

I would rather

I'm totally in trouble. I didn't post yesterday. I was busy, okay? We melted a spatula and I had things to do. Okay?

Really, I had Battlestar Galactica to watch.

This week's question comes down to one detail for me. If my husband could come with me to live in the middle of no-where, well, that's actually what we want. It doesn't even have to be a mansion. But if he can't come, I'm all about tiny apt with 10 friends, as long as he's one of them.