Vanilla Chia Pudding

The newest crave is chia pudding (vanilla). This is a very basic and easy thing to make. The hardest part might be finding chia seeds at the store. Lucky enough our local gourmet store carries chia seeds. Below you can see that all I did was pour everything into a plastic container. Once mixed, place in refrigerator and let it do it's thing. The next day you should have some wonderful and healthy chia pudding. 

6 tablespoons chia seeds

1 teaspoon vanilla

1.5 cups whole milk

1-2 tablespoons honey

Bacon

Who doesn't love bacon? In our house we love bacon (besides one). We practically eat it once a week. So I figured why not give it a try and make it myself. Another reason was to cut out any nitrites. You know, the pink salt that gives us cancer. That is a debate all in its self.

Now one would think that living in the Midwest you would be able to get pork belly for cheap, not so in Wichita. Either I got we don't sell enough to stock or it was $5 lb. So now I had to switch to plan B, make buckboard bacon. This bacon is  similar in method but you use a pork shoulder/butt instead of the fatter pork belly. So on with the experiment.

This picture shows the meat after I pulled it out of the brine.

Next was to add a small amount of cold smoke to the meat. Another new skill I tried/learned. I went the cheap route and used a soldering iron, aluminum can and some pellets.

After a few hours I ended up with this.

Then it was time to cook.

Overall it came out okay. I would like to try pork belly next. The pork shoulder is a very lean cut of meat compared to the belly. That my be why it was not a 100% to my liking. The up side is there was no nitrites added to this dish. 

Velvet Taco Tots

This is my attempt at making the tator tot side dish that we had on our recent family trip to Fort Worth, Texas. I have to give thumbs up to Velvet Taco for this dish. 

This is a picture from Velvet Taco.

This is my take on the dish.

My egg is still runny but nothing like Velvet Taco. This is now my wife's favorite dish.

Back!!!!!!

We are back to having a normal family dinner. With the holidays we were eating left overs and even out of town for several weeks. So this time we went back to our favorite foods,wings and pizza and combined them into one meal. I ended up trying a new and very improved pizza dough recipe and it turned out great. We even made a homemade pumpkin pie. Now the crust is store bought but the rest is all me.


Buffalo chicken with red onions.
Nothing like a good old fashioned pumpkin pie.

Saturday Dinner

Well we ended up eating left overs on Sunday because my Mom came down to celebrate Winters birthday early. I ended up cooking her a homemade pizza with hot wings. Nothing to fancy but easy to to prepare on a busy weekend schedule. No pictures but the food turned out pretty good. I ended up trying a new olive oil dough which Lisa loved and now just needs to tweak the pizza toppings to make it perfect. The wings turned out great even though they are nothing special. Winter was a great help and she actually made her own pizza and helped make the adults pizza. The kids ate the entire pizza which was a first for them. Us adults pigged out and hate all the wings and a few pieces of pizza. It was a nice change to have a big meal with my Mom on a Saturday. This left us with an easy meal to reheat on Sunday.

Burgers and more

We decided to use a few left overs from our Saturday game day/night party to make this weeks Sunday dinner. Not only was the food great but it was nice not having to spend a lot of time making it.

We have a bacon cheeseburger with sauteed mushrooms and a side of spicy corn casserole.

Soup & Steak

Today we went with something a little easier to make since we were going to be busy for most of the day. Lisa and I, love french onion soup, so why not try and make it from scratch. To add to the meal we grilled up a nice peice of flank steak. The left over steak will work great for quesadillas or even fajitas later this week. I (kids) woke me up this morning to eat breakfast so instead of laying around being a bum I went ahead and made the soup. That way all we had to do later was reheat the soup and grill the steak. The end result was a hearty meal that could be made any time of the year.

Main dish was the french onion soup with homemade croutons and melted mozzarella cheese. For the sides we had grilled mushrooms and flank steak. To wash everything down we had some nice 2-buck-chuck wine.