You Ate What...?

I am already in trouble for not blogging about this, so I won't wait any longer. Yesterday we had a bit of a date night and went to Genghis Grill for dinner. For those that haven't been there I'll do an explanation of how it works. For those that have, bear with me. You get a little bowl that you fill with meat, seasoning, and vegetables. You put your sauce on the side, and you drop it off at the grilling station with your verbal order of starch. They have a large variety of meats, seasonings, vegetables, and sauces. We're going to focus on the meat. They have pork, chicken, fish, sliced beef, marinated steak, ground turkey, shrimp, scallops, calamari, and probably some others I'm forgetting. This trip I chose steak, beef, and calamari. Then I saw this in my bowl: Weird thing I ate: squid head That white thing is the upper part of a squid's head. Don't be too alarmed. It was clean inside and out. It was rubbery and hard to bite through. It tasted like, ...

Warning, this is a long post about something that holds one of my passions. All pics were from the manufacturers' sites, Amazon, or Walmart. You have been warned. Okay, I am the first to admit that I am a packrat. I may even border on a few hoarding tendencies (though I will throw out trash 90% of the time, particularly icky trash. I only keep trash like plastic bags or things that have been ruined but still hold memories. I am also a collector. I used to collect wooden boxes. I still have a few, the better quality or larger ones. When I was much younger I collected (and played with) Lady Love Locks dolls. I am a collector that uses the things I collect. Now I am a collector of coffee makers. I adore coffee. I love the taste of a well brewed cup of coffee, and I drink it black with no sugar. I am a purist, if the coffee is good. Starbucks? I have to have cream and sugar. That stuff is gross otherwise. For years we had a run-of-the-mill coffee maker. This is way nicer t...

For some this probably isn't a major thing. People have been making soda for a long time. However, that process was crazy hard and involved things like yeast. I know myself well enough to know that wouldn't work at my house. I also know that I don't like to think about all the things put into regular soft drinks. A year ago we were bored and went to Riverwind Casino on one of their match play nights. We won a hundred and bought: a SodaStream. This is a cool little device whose sole purpose is to put carbon dioxide in water. It's great. They have little bottles of syrup that sort of correspond with name brand drinks. They also have bottles of fruit essence. I love me some lemon water. I also like their made with sugar and Splenda ginger ale. However, this is not about how great SodaStream and it's products are. We need to get into the actual homemade soda thing. Thing I drank: Homemade (in my kitchen) Lavender Soda  I made my own simple syrup and a really stro...

It is that time of year again. I have great memories of the Great State Fair of Oklahoma. Even just thinking the words reminds me of the old jingle. My grandparents and parents would take my brother to the fair every year. We'd ride a couple of rides, go through the crazy houses, go up the space needle, go on the monorail, go up the Oklahoman Tower (usually just dad and me), and always get cotton candy on the way out. It was a big deal back then. Our school would let out for the day and we'd get free tickets. My parents would take another day later on to look at all the "boring" stuff like the different businesses peddling their wares or the photography exhibit. Now it's different. We go to the fair with other adults, so far there are no children old enough to ride the rides or anything. Instead of ride tickets we get crazy fair food. I'm sure as our families grow and our fair budget stretches this will decrease (just like medieval faire) but for now we have ...

One day a few months ago I was really hungry around breakfast time. John and I had been a little testy and we decided to have a nice breakfast out. It was therapeutic, as meals with loved ones often can be. We went to Cattleman's Steakhouse in the Stockyards of OKC. Cattleman's has some seriously delicious food....it's a steakhouse in a stockyards, how much more "local" can you get? They also serve breakfast. Steakhouse breakfast....awesome, just awesome. We are obviously adventurous eaters and there is always something a little odd. Weird Thing We Ate: Lamb Fries with Cocktail Sauce These are also called Rocky Mountain Oysters. They are also not everyone's cup of tea. They are slightly slimy, but in cocktail sauce most anything tastes good. Otherwise they are decent. There are a ton of other things we would probably get there instead of these, but they were a good novelty item and definitely a more Oklahoman dish than most we have tried before.

I've been planning this for about a month, but it took a couple of weeks to get the ingredients and another couple of weeks to actually make it. I was nervous. My family is from the Texas/Oklahoma/New Mexico area and we never ate "traditional Southern cooking" in the least. We ate hamburgers, New Mexican food, spaghetti smothered in sauce, salad, canned soup, roast, stew, pizza, etc. So, I didn't know if I would make Southern food well or that I would like it. Weird thing we ate: Greens with ham hocks It was extremely easy to make and took a really long time to cook, but it was decent. There were 6 ingredients: water, ham hocks, salt, freeze dried garlic, turnip greens, and tatsoi. I don't think we'll use tatsoi again. There's just not enough leaf on them. The turnip greens were huge and worked well. I should have used only one ham hock and more greens, but know I know. The ham hocks provided a good amount of fat which helped quite a bit, I think. There...

After being sick for a couple of weeks and Thanksgiving passing, we finally started getting into our food co-op stuff. We had bought buffalo roast, winesap apples, a bunch of greens, ham hocks, some wheat berries, sandwich meat, and some cheeses. I think it was Thursday I went shopping at the grocery store to round out the rest of my weeks groceries. Now, we've tried before probably about half of the stuff we just bought, but I wanted to try some new meals, or at least some new ways of cooking. Weird thing we ate: Buffalo pot roast with mashed potatoes We didn't actually eat it on Sunday, but this has been a "traditional Sunday dinner" thing, except for the buffalo part. We live in Oklahoma and people raise buffalo like they do cattle, just not as many. We've found ground buffalo at Walmart before, but that's for another discussion. I've never made a pot roast with veggies and stuff cooked in the roast. Normally I just make it in the oven and with a lar...