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...

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.

Asleep at the keyboard

Thanksgiving was great, but I'm a failure. Not because I screwed up the food, not because I broke all the china, not because I got into a knock down drag out argument with another shopper on black Friday, I didn't do any of those things. I'm a failure, because I promised you pictures of everything, and I didn't do it! I forgot to take pictures and it looked gorgeous. Dagnabit! I'm sooo tired, I feel like I need to sleep for a week. We did Thanksgiving up big!

We got to the 'rents at around 9 and put the turkey in. We have pictures of this, but who knows when I can post them, because they were taken on Mom's camera, and that's all still over there. In about an hour it was already brown and on it's way. We chilled for a while, and then Jason's sister and her Husband arrived.

They brought their adorable dog, Edmund. I could probably find you a picture of him, but it wouldn't do him justice. He was really fun. Jason's Dad and Step mom arrived moments later. We took Edmund to the park, and when we got back, the turkey was ready! Okay, so I promised you pictures, I didn't have the camera, so once again, we have these artist's (not necessarily a good artist's) renderings of the food.



It has black on it because that's what color it turned on the grill. It sure tasted good. I then set about making the rest of the food. I did the acorn squash first because it takes longest. As I was cutting them in half, I ran the knife into my finger. So yeah, there was "special flavor" in those, okay not really, I didn't get any blood on there. There's butter, brown sugar and salt in there. Isn't the representation lifelike?

I sliced potatoes next. Miraculously, I didn't cut my finger on the mandolin. Anyone out there know if I pronounce the cooking tool the same way as the instrument? These potatoes were far from healthy, but delicious. Thanks, P Dub!

Mom made the green bean casserole. mmmmmmmm. The mystery artist must know of my love for this dish, as you can see by the lines of yummy emanating from it.

Jason's Sister brought stuffing. It was great! Very flavorful, and a really good texture. I don't really know why the artist decided to draw this one from the side.


I also made rolls, if you can call smearing butter on frozen bread and throwing it in the over making. The artist seems to have great love for spider man.

We also had cranberry relish, mmm, apple and banana salad, yum, and other boring things the artist didn't have time for. BUT, after dinner we had blackberry cobbler and pumpkin pie.

With vanilla ice cream or cool whip. It was very good, and didn't look nearly as sketchy as what this obviously horrible amateur artist did here. In fact, I think he's lost his chances at any further illustration for this blog. No wonder he's starving. I'll try to dig up some actual pictures, I promise. Now I've got to go teach that artist a lesson.

Thanksgiving!

It's tomorrow. We're having the WHOLE family over to my parents' house. And when I say whole family, I mean it, well kinda. It's all of my immediate family and all of Jason's too! We thought we should call it the Wafer family Thanksgiving. So, that 9 people, and I'm cooking. Here's the menu:

Turkey (duh) but smoked on the grill by Jason. It is currently sloshing about in its brine made from apple juice, oranges, salt sugar, garlic, ginger, cloves and bay leaves.

Acorn squash: I made it a few weeks ago for just Jason and I and it was delicious. mmmm.

Green Bean Casserole: I had a dream last night that I forgot it.

Stuffing!

Potatoes: a la P Dub. I think they look great, and I'm looking forward to a new thing that I shouldn't know how to make. By that I mean, if I know how to make it, I will and Richard Simmons will have to come cut me out of my house and weigh me on a truck scale.

Cranberry Relish!

Dried Corn: I've never had this before, but I'm all set to make it! I hope it's good!

Peas and pearl onions: Daddy's favorite. Hard to find every year.

Apple and banana salad!

Gravy!

Rolls!

Pumpkin Pie: I can't claim any control over that one, we got one at the store...

Blackberry Cobbler: I can claim this one, yum.

To drink, white wine and mulled cider. YUM!


We have alternate drinks as well, I don't think I'd want to drink those exclusively. I'm just now realizing that I had a dream about Thanksgiving dinner last night, and I don't think it was good. Boy, I guess I AM nervous.

I'm going to try to remember the camera tomorrow and take pictures, then I will share. Wish me luck!

My Husband ROCKS!

He is indeed the best part of my life. I really like my job, and friends are great, but Jason, he's just above and beyond anything I deserve. On this past random Thursday, I was on my way home, so I called Jason, who had been off that day, to ask what he might like for dinner. He responded that he had dinner "covered". I came home to this:

It was a 2 pound porterhouse steak, marinated for hours in dark Mexican beer, onion, line juice, garlic and peppers ( fill me in if I'm missing something here). It was grilled to perfection with scallions, and giant jalapeno peppers. Under the steak is a mixture of peppers and onions and garlic.
It was delicious. That little brown thing? It's a baked potato. It was huge! Take a look at this picture of it before it was cooked.

That' my second largest pyrex dish. It's big. I opened it up later, and it smelled delicious in there. Now, if you've read about our grilling past, you probably know that Jason doesn't eat beef. So, this was all for me. Yeah, some of it is still in the frige, I think it's for enchiladas later this week. So, it was amazing. Like my hubby. Wow.

Week of Pizza

Believe it or not, we had a LOT of pizza last week, and never saw a delivery man. After our buffalo chicken, we tried a different approach, something Jason had seen online. I present to you Portobello Pizzas.

We started out with four portobello mushrooms. Jason washed them out, oiled the gill side (eeeeeew gills), and put them on the grill for a while. After they were cooked, we topped them. We had two white pizza mushrooms and two regular. On the white we put alfredo sauce, fresh tomatoes and olives. On the regular, pizza sauce, pepperoni, and olives. Mozzarella on both. Yum. We put them back on the gril for just a minute, and the cheese melted into delicious.


They were great. I'm seeing all kinds of recipes that marinate the mushrooms in italian dressing, but we didn't do that and it was delicious. I was assuming that the alfredo ones would be best, but really, the pizza sauce ones were better. Overall, a really easy thing to make. Can you tell, we had corn on the cob with them?

Buffalo Chicken Pizza

So, we have all read about the failbread. But, I have yet to tell you about it's gill buddy and more successful cousin, buffalo chicken pizza. This had become a favorite dish at a restaurant, so we decided to try it at home, and spend less money. It started out with that same dough, whole wheat, I forgot to mention in the previous post, and that's why it's brown. We cooked it for about 20 minutes on the grill with nothing on it. I think next time I'd reduce this time by about 5 minutes, as the bottom was a little more done than I wanted. So, dough cooked, I started to top. First, buffalo sauce. We used Steak and Lube's medium, because it looked like a good, insane, color. Because we're crazy, next time we'll use hot. I also put on some chopped red onion and some chopped celery.


We had some grilled chicken that I chopped up, then dumped in a bag with some more of the buffalo sauce and shook. Last, but certainly not least, I put on some garlic and cheese.


We put it back on the grill and cooked it until the cheese was melted.

Then served.


We ate it with salads, and it was delicious.

Failbread

Last night, we made pizza on the grill. We had bought a new pizza stone for the grill, and also an iron skillet to make deep dish pizza in. I made dough, following about 3 different recipes online and we put some on the stone and some on the skillet. We placed them in the grill. This is what happened.


I didn't oil the stone. I didn't think to. The dough had lots of oil in it, and I didn't remember oiling my ones from pampered chef. Oops. The dough stuck to the stone like there was no tomorrow. It stuck like my finger in the organ bench (gotta be overly informed about my childhood to get that one, ask me if you're really interested) So we had one pizza instead. I'll tell you all about it in just a minute.

Mondays?

Do I only post on Mondays? I tried to keep the one about the grilling until later in the week, but when I posted it, it said Monday! Well, this weekend was pretty slow because Jason was sick! Poor guy, slept most of it through. Today, we are trying to start a diet. I'm not sure it's going to go very well, because I have absolutely zero willpower. I also don't want to give up the foods I like. Okay, love. I really love pizza, and not some no cheese, no bread facsimile of it. That, I hate. I adore french fries, not something cleverly packaged to look like them. Right now I'm really hungry, because we started off with a juice fast to let our stomachs shrink. So, I don't know. I really think we should excercise more. There's the key. I just don't like doing it, and I really hate getting up early. But, I know I'm overweight. I know I should do something. But, also, I'm all for acceptance. Isn't it my choice what I eat, and what I look like? Don't I deserve to be treated the same as thin people? UGH! Why does fried food have to be so good!!!

Grill adventures!

I finally did it! I made things. Things from scratch! These things being a rib rub and barbeque sauce. Before I get too cocky, both need work. The sauce just lacks, something. It's a tomato paste base with brown sugar, dry mustard, vinegar worcestershire, cayennne, and salt, and liquid smoke, and maybe something else I don't remember. Oh yeah, chili powder, and garlic, and onion. I don't know what I'm missing. My plan is to experiment. Yep! If anyone out there thinks of anything, let me know. Anyway, here it is:

We made ribs. I mixed up a rub, it needs something too, but I think I'm on track for that one. It needs more brown sugar. Then we'll see. The problem I have with that is that I have to make ribs every time I want to try it. I know Jason is out there thinking "what's the problem" Hee. These ribs, our first came out BEAUTIFUL. Take a look. Jason is grillmaster. We tried three different rubs, the one on the far right is a simple one I made, the center the complex one and the far left is "control" from a jar.


Here they are cooked. Check out Jason's pink smoke ring.


Too bad we completely lost track of which rub was which sometime during the cooking. There wasn't one that stood out as best...

We also had the staples (you know if you've grilled with us) of baked potatoes, corn and jalapeños. They were good, but I totally burned my lip on a pepper, and not because it was cooked to a high temperature. Whoa!

So, if you've got an idea let me know! I'm open for suggestion, maybe more garlic? If you want to come over and taste it, let me know!

Fair!

This weekend, Jason and I ate our way around the Indiana State Fair. Mmmmm. There's really nothing like fair food is there? If it was around all year, Richard Simmons would have to cut me out of my house, and go weigh me on a truck scale. We ate:

A corn dog (I shared the breading with Jason, because he doesn't like the dog part, mmmm dog)

Ribbon Fries with red hot, and yum

Fiesta Potatoes (potatoes with salsa, cheese and sour cream I give them 5 out of ten fair burps)

Honey Sticks (I think the fair might be a flop without those)

Fried Cheese

Corn

and my two old and new favorites. My old favorite, and probably eternal love, is fried vegetables. That is just good stuff no matter how you come at it. The funniest part was that they were provided to us by a stand called "Dr Vegetable". On the stand were pictures of each veggie, in white coats. I laughed so hard, but not too hard to eat my fried goodness. My new favorite is the pineapple whip. It was delicious, and if a temporary sign in a giant pineapple is to be believed, had only 20 calories. It was like soft serve, but pineapple. yum!!!!

Now that I've talked about the most important parts of the fair, on to the "other stuff". We saw a lot of animals, Jason and I both really like that part. There were some interesting goats, and Indian antelopes that we fed carrot slices to. Did you know that for some reason, angora goats (or at least 2 of the species) don't like carrot slices? Hmmmmm. We saw many bunnies, very soft and cool chickens. The cows were HUGE and some of the pigs were bigger. The biggest, and my favorite animal we saw there were the Belgians. If you've never seen a Belgian horse in person, you don't know how to feel tiny. I love seeing them every year, and last week there were more than I've ever seen before.

Even bigger than the Belgians, were these:





Steam tractors. I'd never seen farm equipment this big, and I work in the sticks. A lot of it was running too. I saw one going really fast, and because I had no idea what it was supposed to do, I dubbed it a hand remover. Because, yeah, it would do that in a jif. We also saw breaksk8. They are cool, but the crap rap we had to put up with as an opener was awful. No just because I don't like rap, but because these guys were really bad. And they really had a bad crowd, not in general, but for them. We were all trying not to laugh, and feeling sorry for them.

There's the fair! Weather was great, and fun was had. yay.

Honeymoon Day 3 (and 4) Part 2

So after we are out at sea, it was time to go to our first dinner. We ended up at a place that was open 24 hours and served all kind of fried bad for you stuff. The potato skins were really just wedge fires with all kinds of stuff on them, but they were good!

You see, our boat had all kinds of different restaurants that we can go to anytime we want. It was really nice. This place and Mambo's overlooked the lobby like area of the boat, and in the lobby there was a really cool ceiling treatment with all kinds of glass icicles hanging. There was also a Chihuly! I love his work, and he's so entertaining too.

After dinner we stopped by the nightclub in the boat, and it's a really cool place that was never as full as it should be. It had beds! A bunch of kinda Moroccan style beds all around the edge of the room. There was music and big TVs and a bowling alley (more later on bowling)

We hung out in a bed for a while and then went back to the cabin to hang out in a different bed. We were TIRED. The thing is, they didn't clip some clip on the underneath of the bed. So, the 2 twin beds that made our full size bed kept sliding apart. So, every couple of hours I'd wake up to find that I was sleeping in a space hammock created by the sheets. They finally fixed this. After a good night's sleep , we spent our next day at sea.

On our first whole day at sea we took time to sit out on the deck and read, and Jason ran around with the ipod. My first honeymoon book was Poltergeist by Kat Richardson. I enjoyed it, but it was kinda slow and difficult to understand, as I had not read the first book (this was the second in the series).
For dinner that night we went to Mambo's. It was tex-mex style. I had fajitas and Jason had these seafood skewers things that were awesomely delicious. That was probably the best restaurant on the boat. After there we headed up for a 50's style night at the big "Spinnaker Lounge". We saw some dancers and listened to some songs then we were pooped and wanted to get some sleep in preparations for our day in Cozumel!

Chinese Food

Yum, I just ate some sesame chicken. And crab rangoons. Chinese food is gooooood. I got the hair stuff taken care of, but I still don't have the music set up. I haven't heard from the organist in 3 days. I'm becoming worried. If it's not settled by Monday, I'll have to take the stuff to be printed without it. Puke.

I'm still not feeling that great, my nose is awful I hope it's better soon....

Johnny Appleseed, Dogs, and Whirligigs

Boy, oh, boy have I been busy. This week at work, I've got 2 class visits tomorrow, both on Johnny Appleseed, who I know NOTHING about until this week, storytime on Thursday, and about a million other things to do!

This weekend was fun though. Saturday, we got up, thought we were going to the bridal show, and found out when we got there that it wasn't until Sunday. Oops. So we went to my Mom's house for some paid labor, and then went home to scrub all of the dirt off.

That night Jason took me out on a date! Yay! He's always coming up with nice stuff for us to do. I love it. What he didn't know until now (maybe) is that I'm content sitting at home with him, or playing video games with him, or taking a walk together. So going out on a nice date is just icing on the cake. We had borrowed my Dad's miata, and drove it over to Dawson's on main street. It's in speedway, and it's where we were thinking of having our rehearsal dinner. We had crab cakes as an appetizer. They were very good. Crunchy on the outside and very good and dense with crab on the inside. Delicious. Then I had "smothered chicken" it was chicken with a Dijon sauce, then on top of that, scallions, mushrooms, bacon and cheese. WOW. It was so so so good. The mashed potatoes were a little dry, but the green beans were good. I loved it overall. I really want that chicken again. I want the recipe. mmmmmm.

After dinner we went over to The Jazz Kitchen to see a band called "The Bad Plus". Jason had heard them on the (satellite) radio, and said they were good, and did lots of interesting covers such as "Smells like Teen Spirit" etc. Well, we got there, and they didn't. They played a couple of covers but nothing really up my alley too much. Their original stuff was interesting if hard for me to understand. I felt like they were too hip for me. BUT, I enjoyed it.

Sunday we actually went to the bridal show, and saw some interesting stuff. For instance, places that will preserve your bouquet. It looks really cool. We talked with a couple of cake people and have a couple of leads! Yay. Most of the stuff there was reception sites and photographers. Since we have both, we got through pretty quickly and headed for....

The British car show. I was excited to go, because my dream car, my favorite car ever, the best car in the world is British. This car would be the Morgan plus 8. (see illustration at top). Unfortunately, there were no Morgans at the show, but there were a lot of interesting cars to see. I like the MGs too, and there were a few jaguars that were really pretty. I got a tiny plus 8 and a Morgan shirt. Not half bad...

There was however, one car that stood out among it's fellows. It was not British. It was silver, well, stainless steel colored at least. It had gull wing doors for you to hit your head upon. You can probably already see it's picture at the bottom of the page. Maybe the best thing it had however, was a flux capacitor. YES! It was a delorean. Yes! It really did have a flux capacitor. When we got excited about it and said, "It has a flux capacitor" the owner of the car looked at me and said the words that made me love her, this stranger. She said, with a straight face "It's what makes time travel possible". I almost cried. Then we noticed that it had a license plate that said.... "OUTA TYME" YAY!!! I was so happy, and then her husband asked if Jason would like a picture of me behind the wheel!!!! YAY! See the result! It was severely awesome. I'm kinda embarrassed for getting that excited to sit in a car that didn't fit in at the British car show, but hey, I am who I am, thanks Popeye.