Steak... It's What's For Dinner
I don't think it is any surprise to anyone that I love steak and mushrooms. But I didn't feel like that was a new and interesting recipe, so I got online and found this recipe entitled Men Love This Steak. It's a new recipe, so I figured why not. It was pretty good -- steak topped with mushrooms and bacon. To complement the entrée, I added oven-roasted red potatoes, and green beans cooked in chicken broth. Aaron had purchased some fresh mozzarella, so we added that to the green beans. It looked a little odd, but was really tasty!
We made 'Dirt' for a dinner with the Meeces and had a ton of left-over oreos, so Aaron suggested we make an Oreo Cheesecake. My first step was buying a springform pan! (Yay, for $10 off coupons from Kohl's. I got three different sized pans for $11!!) Since I had reduced-fat oreos, I decided to go with low-fat cream cheese, too. It probably would have tasted better with full-fat cream cheese, but it was still very tasty. So tasty, in fact, that I 'forgot' to bring it to school and share it with everyone. I did share a little with the Howenstines -- which is also when I discovered that you should probably put foil or something down when baking a cheesecake, as the butter from the oreo crust seemed to have melted onto the bottom of my oven, causing a smoking problem when I tied to bake a take-n-bake pizza for dinner that night. Good thing Ken is a firefighter!
My dad always enjoyed rhubarb. We rarely ate it, and I don't really remember liking it, but I do recall dad loving it. So when I received an email containing a recipe for a Strawberry-Rhubarb pie, I knew I needed to attempt it for my daddy's birthday! I went out and bought Monte Vista strawberries and fresh rhubarb. Cleaning all the produce took a while... and let me tell you, the smell of *fresh* rhubarb is not my favorite. It's not a horrible smell, but it is not what I would consider tasty either. Luckily you add so much sugar in the end all you smell is sweetness! I also used pre-made pie crust; the kind you use that you roll out into the pan. It did not roll out so well. I ended up balling and re-rolling the crust for the lattice top crust. But it all worked out. I tried engraving "Happy Birthday, Dad!" into the lattice, but you could not really see it once I baked the pie. For my first attempt at using rhubarb, it turned out deliciously! It was super tasty!
So, apparently I had purchases way too much rhubarb for one pie. Having already chopped up the malodorous rhubarb, I decided to make something else. I remember my Granny making Rhubarb Upside-Down Cake, so I thought I would attempt it. I basically made another batch of the Strawberry-Rhubarb pie filling for the bottom of the cake pan. But I did not have a yellow cake mix, do rather than walk my lazy ass down to the grocery store (which is less than half a mile away mind you) I was going to make a cake from scratch. How hard could it be? Well it was not hard, but it was time consuming! No wonder people just buy a box! I used a 1-2-3-4 Cake recipe from the Joy Of Cooking. The cake itself turned out really well, I was able to make a few cupcakes because I did not want to overfill the other cake pan. It would have been super tasty with some chocolate frosting, but I digress. The Upside-Down Cake was also scrumptious! It looks kind of disgusting in that picture -- like a bunch of raw meat on a cookie sheet. But it was very tasty.
