Quickie post + a giveaway!! Funnnn!!
After Tuesday’s breakfast bowl, that was all I could think of when I woke up.
- 1 amazing nectarine
- 1 banana
- Nancy’s organic plain yogurt
- Cascadian Organic high fiber morning cereal
- 1/2 Ezekiel sprouted english muffin + pnut butter
Whoa.
I loved the variety. If you know me, when it comes to food, I like variety. I am ALWAYS trying to split with Chris when we go out to eat. He’s not a fan though. He says, he has his mind set on a certain thing and just wants that. Borrrriiiing 
However, when I’m with my mom, she is always up for it!
It’s like my own mini-buffet!
I was cleaning the kitchen in preparation for a BIG day of baking.
And then I did this….
Cracked.
Totally salvageable! I do not recommend juggling watermelons + cantaloupes at the same time.
Lunch repeat from yesterday too, with a few changes!
I used a tortilla this time, which go sooo deliciously crispy but for this particular sandwich, bread is better.
- tortilla
- cheese
- tempeh
- cheese
- tortilla
After it cooked I added: cucumbers + pickles + avocado
carrots, cuc’s + curry honey hummus on the side
And then I got my bake on. Recipes + a TON of photos coming soon. There were too many to go through tonight. I was busy all day [working on headers + a few other projects] and didn’t get home until about 11pm.
These babies are vegan…and delicious!
A non-vegan version.
A bread version. mmmm
We enjoyed a fun dinner with Ann + Kurtz tonight.
We both had piles of veggies that we wanted to use up with a little bread + shrimp on the side. Simple summer grilled dinners are the best!
Gobble.
When I recently returned back to Colorado, from visiting my family in Ohio, I had an awesome package from Lundberg waiting for me. I absolutely LOVE Lundberg’s products. The quality is awesome, everything always tastes great and they are Monsanto FREE!! I use so many of their products. Most frequently I use their rice + brown rice syrup.
They rock.
I don’t usually go for the boxed grain mixes with seasoning packets because I enjoy adding my own seasonings and buying the grains in bulk. However, it was nice to not have to think about what to add and just throw it in the pot. The ingredient list was much better than the norm and the product was delicious. Both Chris + I loved all of these couscous mixes.
I think the curry was my favorite but I also really liked the savory herb. I have been so obsessed with quinoa + millet that I have forgotten about couscous. SO tasty!
Lundberg was generous enough to offer a giveaway and send one lucky commenter 4 boxes, as I show above. I’m excited to promote their product, even though I have no gain from it. I love to spread the word about such quality companies.
This giveaway ends at 5pm on Friday. There is one way to enter [whatever, I’m old school like that].
Leave a comment below telling me about your biggest kitchen flop ever. Did you ever completely ruin a meal when you had friends over? Drop something coming out of the oven?? Dish your best story!
I think one of my winners [there are a few!] was taking out this layered pudding/whipped cream/walnut crust dessert called Cream Delight out of my parent’s fridge in Ohio. It was a big 9×13 pan and I don’t know WHAT happened but the whole thing ended up on the floor. Quite ridiculous. However, you know I sat on the floor eating it with a spoon. 
Happy Thursday!!
Night!
Ashley
PDF 
The fact that I’ve done this twice in the last month worries me that I might be losing my mind…
I’ve had major kitchen flops with cooking etc… but how can one screw up coffee??? in so many ways… this morning, i was up early & my boyfriend was in the shower. i thought i’d make a nice pot of coffee and surprise him. i put the filter, measured coffee, poured the water & pressed start. good to go, right?! then i started doing dishes while i waited for the coffee to brew… glanced back at it and noticed it steaming and dripping and leaking off the counter and onto the floor. i realized while doing dishes that the plastic filter basket was in the sink. i turned it off immediately and tried to stop the mess from leaking and spilling everywhere. unplugged the coffee machine & tried to take the paper filter with coffee grinds out… it was wet and soggy and gross and slipped out of my hand onto the floor. so instead of a nice cup of coffee after my boyfriend got out of the shower… he encountered my frantic mess with coffee grinds and hot coffee EVERYWHERE… all over the kitchen. you would have thought i’d learned the first time this happened. oy vey!
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Uh, yeah. I definitely have a horror story.
A few years ago on Mother’s Day I was making my mother a delicious Snickers cake. I turned on the oven to pre-heat and set on my way mixing the ingredients together. I had everything mixed together and was pouring the mix into a 9X13 when I noticed a little smoke coming from the oven. I didn’t think too much of it at first, because my husband in notorious for cooking frozen pizza’s in the oven straight on the rack which melts all over the oven and sometimes burns off the next time you start the oven. But after a minute I realized it was more than normal! I opened the oven to see what was going on and flames came pouring out the door as soon as I opened it. I grabbed the fire extinguisher and got the fire out only after our entire house was filled with THICK smoke. I later remembered that I had stored a tupperware container filled with rolls in the oven and had forgotten to take them out when I started the oven!
Needless to say I did end up getting a new range and microwave after that incident.
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these comments are hilarious. i have totally done the stereotypical “leave the neck and giblet bag” in the thanksgiving turkey, but the worst was cooking dinner for my in-laws. it was the first time i had met them and we had them over for dinner and i thought to make lobster to impress. i spent major bucks on the meal and went through the trauma of killing live lobsters (never again) and then i boiled them.
for thirty minutes.
they were so rubbery you could practically bounce them. it was mortifying at the time – but now this is a favorite inside joke in our family. live and learn!
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I guess my most recent kitchen flop was trying to incorporate kale into some protein smoothies and then not blending them enough so there were bits and pieces of kale floating around and the whole thing tasted quite outdoorsy but not in the good way. the husband was not pleased so we ended up chugging pint sized glasses of the stuff and then had the worst taste of grass in our mouthes the rest of the day.
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One time I decided to make a turkey burger about 10 minutes before I was supposed to leave for work. Apparently the stove was on too high, as the burger started to burn and the smoke alarms went off! I was living on campus at college, and whenever the smoke alarm goes off, the fire department is automatically notified to respond. At this point, I needed to leave for work and so I tried to call in to tell them I was going to be late. Whoever answered the phone couldn’t hear me because the fire alarm was so loud. I had to have one of my roommates come back and deal with the fire department as I went to work, still hungry! Ah, kitchen flops. Gotta love ‘em!
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One time in high school (when I was first learning how to cook) I decided to make my mom dinner for Mother’s Day. She really likes pesto so I decided I would make her some sort of spaghetti with homemade pesto sauce. I searched long and hard on-line and finally settled on one of Rachael Ray’s recipes. Her pesto sauce called for A LOT of arugula so that’s what I used. Having never made my own pesto before, I didn’t know what it was supposed to taste like or really smell like but it looked good, so once it formed a sauce-like consistency I poured it onto the spaghetti without even trying it. Once my mom, sister, and brother all sat down to eat.. I served them each a portion of what I thought would be one of my first culinary delights.. Upon first bite, my brother asked me (in all seriousness) if I had made “grass pasta” for dinner, my sister immediately spit hers out and my mom started hysterically laughing. I then ran into my room crying and shut the door. I will never forget that infamour Mother’s Day, and nor will my family. To this day, my brother inquires whether or not I’ll be making anything grass-flavored for dinner. I think he really liked it.
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This past semester my roommate and I could NOt fall asleep. SO we decided to have a cooking fest with the most random items. We made cookies out of instant oatmeal packets and a curry.
BOth were failures! The oatmeal cookie looked like something had vomited and our curry wasn’t cooked enough and then BURNED our pan. What’s worse is our professor dropped off our other roommate and smelled the burned curry and gave us some of teh weirdest looks when we tried to explain what happened….Awkward.
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I forgot how much I like couscous. I often overlook it, choosing quinoa instead.
Last week I made dinner for my entire family at my moms. While dinner went off with no problems, loading everything back in the car proved tougher than I thought. While carrying my slow cooker in one arm and my rice cooker in the other I walked down the porch stairs, aound all the people who were talking outside, between the trees only to trip over my mom (evil) dog hiding in the shadows! I ate it hard, in front of EVERYONE!
Everything flew out of my hands and a few obscenties flew out of my mouth. My right shoulder still isn’t right.
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I haven’t had a lot of disastrous flops that really WERE a big deal, since no company was over or anything like that. I did accidentally try to take a bundt cake out the pan too early and it basically fell apart into pieces and I had to awkwardly put it back together again.
Another time, my mom had basil in the food processor waiting to make pesto and she had draped over wet paper towels to keep the leaves fresh, and then forgot to take them out and essentially we accidentally made “paper towel pesto” without realizing it, and then poured it all over pasta! Needless to say, we had to start over once we realized the texture was off…
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One of my biggest flops was making pesto sauce in the blender. As I had the blender running, I used chopsticks to scrap down the sides so that everything would mix evenly. Being the careless person I am, I would accidentally push the chopsticks too far down the blender so that the blades would constantly nick the chopsticks. I didn’t think anything of it, until much later when I served the pesto and there were chips of wood in it! So yup, I had to throw the pesto out. And yes, when I took a look at the chopsticks I had used, they were noticeably shorter.
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I think one of the worst was one thanksgiving when my sister-in-law’s dog took off with our ham. Grabbed it right off the counter and took off through the open door! We caught him, but unfortunatley we didn’t have ham that day because no one wanted to eat it. We surely weren’t going to let the DOG have it either! At least we still had turkey… lol
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ha probably when I was making margarita ice cream pie (recipe here: http://www.thesweetslife.com/2010/02/margarita-ice-cream-pie.html) and put the mixer on too high of a speed—ice cream and tequila ALL over my kitchen. it was sticky for weeks!! oops…
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I’ve definitely tried experimenting with recipes and have friends over.. thinking they would work, but they don’t! I remember I made this zucchini bread using no butter and sugar, subbed out AP flour for coconut flour and it ended up being a big loaf pan of mush! The top cooked and browned, so at least 5% of it was edible. I was just upset that I was pumping people up thinking it would taste great and threw it away before they got there!
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Is Blogengine buying an enormous improve shortly? I listen to that they have been doing so to battle off wordpress 3.zero – simply curious in case you had listen to anything at all?
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My biggest kitchen flop was very dramatic. It was my very first time making pumpkin bread. With the entire house filled with the spicy scent of the fresh bread…and after 45 minutes of pent up excitement I eagerly went to take the bread out of the oven. The bread made it out of the oven…just not to the counter. Needless to say the tile floor did not treat the glass bread pan very well. After all my excitement and hard work I didn’t even get one nibble of the bread- for fear of ingesting glass.
There is a happy ending though- I made the bread again the next day and it was fab.u.lous. Now it is one of my favorite recipes- both for the taste and the story!
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