Jenny Garland

Cricut and I have been prepping materials for our McKinney Marthas get together next week. Anyone have a guess what the craft is?

I’ll have a tutorial up for the mystery craft next Friday.

PS – I was going to write the tutorial for the stocking tonight but I’m too lazy (grin). I’ll have that next week for ya too

Brad was gone all week for work (San Francisco – tough life, right?) and the girls and I ate dinner at home two nights. One night we had sandwiches (clearly, they were turkey with American cheese, being the culinary expert I am). And tonight I made the most disgusting, inedible, all around nasty pot roast. Kate said “This is not so yummy.” Sweet girl. It was so, so much worse than “not so yummy.” My drive to cook well is diminishing at a rapid pace.

On a completely unrelated note, do any of you peeps do Zumba? I take yoga and kickboxing classes at my gym. Occasionally I’ll take a step class if I feel like being embarrassed by my inability to face to the right direction Back to Zumba. The yoga teacher I love teaches Zumba and she says you don’t have to be *ahem* uber coordinated to get an awesome workout and keep up. Is this true? Or should I stick with inner peace on one day and kicking the crud out of someone the next?

Okay, gotta go watch Project Runway and Real Housewives… OMG, friends, Orange County’s back on tonight!! Weeee hoooo!!

xoxo,

So tonight’s dinner. Yeah. About that. This is how it went:

Bleh. I made three things: London Broil, popovers, and a salad with homemade Caesar dressing.

Let’s start with the steak. Okay, seriously. Where did I go wrong? The recipe said to broil my tenderized flank steak 4 inches from heat for 5 minutes. Then, I was supposed to turn the steak over and broil for another 3-5 minutes. I did 5 minutes on the first side and 4 minutes on the second side. I even measured to make sure the broiler pan thingy was 4 inches from the heat.  The steak was a rubbery mess. Edible? Kinda, sorta. Tasty? No. It tasted like a steak you would get at the Sizzler that was under the heat lamp all day. I snapped pictures but it turns out poorly cooked steaks are really gross to look at so I’m not going to make you suffer.

That’s okay though, because I still had opportunity to shine with the popovers, right? Here’s what my cookbook told me my popovers should look like:

Cute, right? I was feeling really optimistic as I put them in the oven, looking like this:

My optimism dwindled as I took them out of the oven looking like this:

You think that’s funkified? Wait until you see what they looked like after I popped them out of the ramekins:

What in the world? How is that even possible? My poor, pathetic, tumorish popovers They tasted good but were so fugly.

Finally, my salad. I used Dole’s Sassy Baby Blend:

I added tomato, orange bell pepper, croutons, and freshly grated Parmesan cheese. So far so good. Enter homemade Caesar dressing. The recipe called for one tin of anchovies. I’ve never made Caesar dressing before so I didn’t think anything of it. Um, one tin of anchovies is way too much. After eating the salad, I smell like a fish died inside me. Not kidding.

Overall… solid effort, miserable results. I gave myself a C- because I think trying counts for something, right? We’re having leftovers tomorrow (wow, everyone is so excited about that in my house as you can imagine) and Thursday I’m going to try roasting a chicken. God help me.