Another Olive Garden Visit

Four cheese stuffed mezzaluna with sausage is the dish my husband ordered. It was in a tomato cream sauce. He said it was good.

I had the four cheese stuffed mezzaluna with shrimp with a white wine sauce. It was also good. Mezzaluna refers to the type of ravioli in this dish, it's shaped like a crescent moon. Wonder why we frequent Olive Garden so often? Well, it is good, our daughter likes it, and...we have oodles of free gift cards. Thank you American Express rewards!

Spaghetti and Meatballs - Half Homemade

Spaghetti and meatballs....half homemade made the table this week.
This is the homemade part. The last frozen bag of homemade spaghetti meat sauce. I thaw it in the microwave for about three minutes. (note to self: must do another big batch of meat sauce)

This is the "not homemade" part. These are Schwan's frozen meatballs. I brown them up in the pan really good, and then add the sauce and let it all simmer for an hour or so. This is a family favorite! The noodles we used were Barilla spaghetti, high-protein.

Brown Box Delivery

A peek inside this week's organic "brown box" delivery. The contents are always a surprise, and that has helped us try new foods. This week: parsnips and a rutabaga are the surprises. I'm positive my family hasn't ever tried these. I think I'll chop them up with carrots and potatoes and some onion and roast them. I'll post the experiment later this week.

A Burger Fit for Royalty

We had a late lunch at Red Robin, a restaurant we visit frequently because it's kid-friendly and nearby. My husband ordered this Royal Red Robin burger. It has a fried egg on it! It's also promoted as a "smiling burger," but for some reason, this one looks like it's frowning.

Crab-Stuffed Shrimp

Crab-stuffed shrimp. This little delight is only created in my kitchen once a year. It's not really that difficult, it's just a New Year's Eve tradition thing.

Here are the ingredients. The king crab is leftover crab from feasts throughout the year. I just tuck the leftovers in a freezer bag to save for this dish.

First, thaw, peel and de-vein the shrimp. Usually, raw shrimp are gray and cooked shrimp are pink. This was a bag of raw PINK shrimp. It was the only bag of right size shrimp I could find. You'll want shrimp in the 26-30 count range.

I shredded the crab, added a good amount of shredded Parmesan cheese, and crumbled about 7 crackers into the bowl. Saltines work well, or anything you have saltine-like. Then I sprinkled Old Bay seasoning over it all and plop in about a half-cup of mayo. I also add about two tablespoons of melted butter. Then, mash it all together, and take little balls of the mixture and place them on the shrimp's back. Bring the tail end over the top. Here is a baking sheet ready to go.

I put these in a 350 degree oven until the shrimp were done, and the mixture turned just a little bit brown.

These cupcakes have nothing to do with the crab-stuffed shrimp recipe, except that they arrived from my neighbor's house while I was making the shrimp. Aren't they pretty cupcakes? They tasted good, too.

Here are the shrimp all done. Pop them onto a serving tray. I share them with neighbors on New Year's Eve. They are so yummy, I always wonder why I don't make them any other time of year....but why mess with tradition?

Neighborhood Progressive Dinner

We had our neighborhood progressive dinner this week, where appetizers, salads, main course and desserts are all at different houses. Sixteen adults and 3 children on our block participated. My house was the "salad house."

Here is my "bad kitty" helping me set the table.
Appetizers, lots of them! These dinners are nights when everyone eats too much. The hot artichoke dip was hard to stop eating!

I did three salads: Caesar, chicken salad and a chopped salad. I put out cards listing the ingredients so people wouldn't be surprised by anything they might not like. For example, I put dried apricots in the chicken salad, and that can scare some people. The main dish event I featured on Boise Daily Photo - it was ham and stuffed baked potatoes.

This is a quickly-disappearing dessert tray of cream puffs and "Spinuzzis" - which are similar to a dessert cannelloni. They were fabulous.

That's a cheesecake birthday cake, one of our neighbors was celebrating a birthday on dinner night. There was also pecan pie, pumpkin pie, sugar cookies and that bottle had an interesting concoction in it called bushwhacker. It was a mix of all kinds of liquors, and notice there were really small cups by the bottle, that was a good thing. The giant carafe was filled with spice cranberry juice, and there was also hot chocolate, along with creme de menthe for those who wanted a little extra in the chocolate.

I highly recommend this type of event in your neighborhood. Involve 6-8 houses to keep the number controllable. We've also done this in the summer with a "front yard barbecue" version.

Olive Garden Review

We had gift cards for free dining at Olive Garden. It's a place we haven't been to in years, because when I think of Olive Garden, I think of pasta. And pasta at home is so delicious, we haven't ordered it at restaurants. We started our meal with soup. I had the creamy chicken gnocchi soup with spinach. It was O-K. Tasted kind of like a canned soup.

I ordered the Venetian apricot chicken. The chicken was grilled and covered with an apricot citrus sauce. It was good. A light sauce that was tangy, but not too much. I asked for fresh grated Romano on my dish, I like Romano or parm on just about everything. We had a nice wine, probably a table wine, a red zinfandel from Rancho Zabaco.

My husband ordered the grilled chicken and gnocchi. I took a taste, it was a good dish.
And this is what my daughter chose for dessert, after ordering her usual "mac-n-cheese" for dinner. This is lemon cream cake. It tasted just like cheese cake. It was good, although we didn't get much more than a little taste because my daughter REALLY liked it. She wants to go back and just order this. We had a nice meal and will return. I wasn't crazy about where we were seated, which was bordering aisles on two sides, but the meal was relaxing when it had been a hectic day.