Thursday’s Culinary Adventure XI

 

Tonight on Thursday’s Culinary Adventure:

Huzzah!  Don’t they sound delicious?  I saw this Recipe on One More Moore’s blog, and since I’m always up for mixing up the ol’ spaghetti-tacos-stir fry rotation, I decided to try it out!

You will need:

For Meatballs:

2 lbs. ground turkey (or beef, if you’re like that.)

1/3 c. fresh parsley (or a tsp. or so dried, if you’re like THAT)

2 garlic cloves, minced

2 Tb. chopped onions

1c. bread crumbs

dash of salt and pepper

2 eggs

2 Tb. soy sauce

For Sauce:

1 can whole berry cranberry sauce.

1 12oz bottle chili sauce (usually found by the ketchup)

1 Tb. mustard

1 Tb. lemon juice

1 Tb. brown sugar

1 garlic clove (minced)

- Put all of the stuff for your meatballs together in a bowl. 

 

Mix er on up and add the ground turkey.  Blend with your hands. (Eeww.  I know, its gross, and I’m sorry.)

-Shape into little, 1 inch balls, and place on FOIL LINED cookie sheets.  If you do not line them with foil, the cookie sheets will end up looking like this.

(or so I’ve heard…)

- This will take you a pretty long time, and you will be very tired.  Like this.

This recipe makes a LOT of meatballs.

 

Like 30…or 106…I’ve never been very good at guessing the quantity of things. 

Let’s just say, I froze about a quarter of the meatballs to use later in spaghetti, and we will still be eating meatballs for many nights.

-Bake those meaty meatballs at 450 for about 8-10 minutes- or until they are brown all the way through.

-While your meatballs are cookin’, stir all of the ingredients for your sauce into a…well…SAUCEpan, and heat over medium heat until they are all melted together and delicious looking.

CONFESSION:  I forgot to get chili sauce at the store!  Whoops!  I just added 12 oz of ketchup, mixed with 1 Tb. of chili powder.  Don’t you think that is probably the same thing?  Not sure…

-Throw your cooked meatballs into the crock pot, and dump the sauce on top.

-Cook them on low for an hour or two or three, until they are warm, saucy, and you are ready to serve them.

-We put ours over rice.

Taste Testers Say:

Brian: 

Yummm!  I love meatballs!

Caitlin: Yay!  They are tasty and apparently make me smile! (Confession: I forgot to take this picture until I was sitting here at the computer, blogging.)

Joseph: Yeah, Yeah, the meatballs are okay, but kind of a weird texture for me.  GIVE ME MORE BANANA-CHOCOLATE MILKSHAKE!!!  (He is my son.)

Summary:  Yum!  These are very tasty, and a nice change from the spaghetti-and-meatball scene.  My only advice, and maybe it is just personal preference, is to add MORE cranberry sauce.  I think that next time I will ad 1.5 cans instead of 1.  I felt like it needed a little more of a cranberry punch.  Also, maybe double the sauce recipe- the extra sauce is good over rice, and when it comes to meatballs, I think the more sauce the better.

Grade: B+

(PS, I hope you appreciate that I restrained myself from all of the BALL jokes that I could have made on this post.  Really.  I could have made a LOT.  In case you wanted to hear them, pretty much just subtract the word “meat” from the word “meatball” every time it is used.  Haha!  See?!  I made all of the “meatballs” a different color to ease your way.  You’re welcome.)

Groggy

 

Don’t you sometimes feel like this after an afternoon nap?

I know I do.

And even a blankie and a bottle of toothpaste can’t make it better.

This is what 4:00-4:15 pm looks like at my house.  How about yours?

(PS 4:00-4:15 AM have been pretty brutal around here lately too…) 

Question: Why no family picture in your Holiday cards?

 

 

Answer:

Brian: Check     Caitlin: Check    Joseph: Been hitting the bottle a little too hard…

 What is Joseph doing???

Caitlin: Check     Joseph: Check     Brian: ?  Umm…Brian? 

Too bad, because that would have been a good one…

In fact:

 

Awww!  Much better!

Double chins:  Check and check. (Joseph wants D.O.W.N!)

 Sometimes when I am outside, my glasses make me look like the Unibomber…

Anyway, you get the idea…

And, when I tried to take some of just Joseph:

So that solves the mystery that people have been asking about.  Here is the only picture that we seriously considered:

Not bad!  But, lets face it, most people just want to see Joseph, and this is not the best one of him.

(P.S.  Where did he come from?????!)

We went with this one instead.

Here’s rooting for next year!!

 

They Like Me, They Really Like Me!

Look! Look! Look! I got an AWARD!!! Isn't that cool?
And, no, it's not from Brian. (Brian, where is my award???)

Mommy of Ms (a fellow blogger who is really funny!) gave it to me!

Wasn't that nice?

I am basking in the fact that someone other than my close friends and family is reading my blog and enjoying it...

(Sigh of contentment)

If you look at my blogger profile, you can see the blogs that I am following. You should check them out! They all deserve this award too!

(And you can better believe that I am subscribing to Mommy of Ms blog right this minute...yes, you can buy my love. Although I WAS reading it anyway...)

Boy

Yesterday, on the 4th of January,

my son Joseph burped at the dinner table. 

He laughed. 

And then we laughed. (because, hey, burps are kind of funny!)

He then made himself burp again. (haha.)

And again.

And again.

Until he vomited.

He still laughed.

Is it wrong if I pray for a girl next?

 

(note the ornament in action…)

What Does That Make Brian…?

 

The other night we heard a knock on our door.  Brian was reading to Joseph, so he called me to come and get it.

After peeking through our beside-the-door-window to make sure it wasn’t some psycho killer (why would they be knocking?  And what do they look like?), I opened it to find a young lady standing there.

She smiled at me and said,

“Is your Mom or Dad home?”

WHHHHHAAAATT?

My Mom or Dad?

All of my life, I have heard that I look young.  But now, at 24, do I still look young enough to be living at home with my Mom and Dad? Really?  Do I look under 18? 

And what, exactly, is it about me that looks so young?

Is it my complexion?  Because adults gets zits too, you know!!

(If you had told the 14-year-old me that I would still be having break-outs at 24, I would have cried all four of my dorky little eyes out!)

Is it my chubby cheeks? Lots of women have chubby cheeks, you know.  My mom does (sorry Mom, but you know that you do…), and nobody thinks that she’s 16!! (Although, they do think that she is 30… kiss!  kiss!)

The pontytail? 

The glasses?

The HUGE breasts?  (Okay, I don’t have huge breasts, but I do have a HUGEly stuffed bra!)

And, here’s what, for me, makes it even worse.  I bet you a million trillion bucks that I was, in fact, OLDER than the dimwit standing in front of me!  She was 19, max. 

She must have noticed the look on my face, because she said, “Oh, ummm…I mean, are you the lady of the house?”

“Yes.” I replied.

“Oh, haha, sorry about that, I don’t have my glasses on,” lied the LIAR. 

If you can’t see my face without your glasses, then I am pretty sure that you shouldn’t be DRIVING without your glasses.

She went on to try to sell me some frozen meat. 

I lied and said that we were vegetarians,

and shut the door before I snapped her skinny teenager spine between my massive child-bearing thighs!! 

Take that, you blind, presumptuous, meat-seller!  

I turned to find a laughing, laughing, laughing Brian. 

But, really, the joke is on him.

Because, if the high-school-drop-out-meat-selling-chick is right, and I DO look 16, then that would make him either

1) a pedophile, or

 2) my father.

Resolve

 

Happy 2009!!  Brian and I watched some movies last night, barely made it to midnight, kissed when the ball dropped, then fell asleep!  Ah, New Years in the life of Parents-of-a-One-Year-Old!

Some resolutions for this next year:

- Clean less, play more.

- Follow the motto “Surround yourself only with things that are useful or that you find beautiful.”  Clear out the junk!!! (Unfortunately, I also have to keep things that are useful/beautiful to Brian and Joseph…) 

- Do things as needed; don’t let them pile up!

- Start a garden. (This also includes convincing Brian to start a garden.  So, please, please, please???)

- Be/stay active!  Our little boy is very busy, and likes to explore, so I have not excuse!

- Read one book a month.

That is all that I can think of right now, I may add to it later on!  I’m off to take a nap- my throat is disconcertingly scratchy…