Becoming A "Real Housewife"

In 2 months my little sister/best friend is turning 21. I want 2 make the day extra special and make some delicious, cool appetizers. I’m envisioning “Top Chef” except without a true chef.
I started working towards my goal this weekend. My friend Tamara helped. We made “bacon-wrapped ginger soy scallops” minus the scallops (to save some cash). We tried 2 different dips. 1 from Tamara’s head and 1 from my recipe book.

Bacon-Wrapped Ginger Soy Scallops
1/4 cup soy sauce
1 Tbs. dark brown sugar
1.5 tsp. minced fresh ginger
6 very large dry sea scallops
1 8-oz. can sliced water chestnuts, drained
12 slices bacon, cut in half crosswise
Directions: Position a rack in the upper third of the oven. Line the bottom of a broiler pan with foil, replace the perforated top part of the pan, and put the whole pan on the oven rack. Heat the oven to 450 degrees.
In a medium bowl, combine the soy sauce, brown sugar and ginger. If the muscle tabs from the sides of the scallops are still attached, peel them off and discard them. Cut each scallop into quarters. Marinate the scallop pieces in the soy mixture for 15 minutes. Reserve the marinade.
To assemble stack two slices of water chestnut in the center of a piece of the bacon. Put a piece of scallop on top of the water chestnuts. Wrap each end of the bacon over the scallop and secure with a toothpick. Repeat with the remaining bacon, water chestnuts and scallops (you may not use all of the water chestnuts).
Remove the broiler pan from the oven and quickly arrange the bacon-wrapped scallops on the hot pan so that an exposed side of each scallop faces up. Drizzle the scallops with the reserved marinade. Bake, truning the scallops over once after 10 minutes, until the bacon is browned around the edges and the scallops are cooked through, about 15 minutes total.

My bacon-wrapped water chestnuts turned out really good! Now I have 2 months 2 come up with 3 other appetizers. Hmm. Any ideas?

This weekend I had the pleasure of being a judge for the Girl Scouts Cookie Creations Contest in East Grand Forks. Girl Scout Troops compete against each other to make the best recipe using at least one Girl Scouts cookie. It was hard work judging…eating delicious desert after delicious desert…from caramel cheescake to peanut butter pie. I wanted to eat all of every single one of the around a dozen deserts. The girls are definitely gaining a lot of useful skills through Girl Scouts…and not just “housewife skills.”
Many of them were excellent at describing their deserts in front of a crowd of people, which will be very helpful in the future.
The winning recipe was “Thin Mint Truffle” from Troop 20305.

Thin Mint Truffle
1 box Girl Scouts Thin Mints
1-8 oz. cream cheese
1 pkg. Bakers semi sweet chocolate chips

Directions: Crush Thin Mints. Mix in cream cheese. Roll into 1 inch balls. Dip balls into melted chocolate. Let harden on wax paper-covered cookie sheet (in the fridge to speed up process.) These need to be refrigerated because of the cream cheese.

Big surprise. It’s hard to change. If you haven’t noticed, I haven’t blogged (and therefore cooked) for a couple months. I, like Carrie in Sex and The City II, am more “Coco Chanel than coq au vin.” I could practically “store shoes in my oven.”
I’m going to try to cook more again and be a better housewife, but I’m also going to blog about some other housewife issues, like decorating and party planning, which I both love.
I’ll also blog about some more modern things women do, like the chemical peel I got done and my report on permanent makeup:)
I hope that you will enjoy that more than I enjoy cooking. JK. Kind of.

I had big plans to go to my parents’ house for Thanksgiving, but unfortunatly because of the weather my husband and I never made it there. We made the best of it though. A group of friends came over to my apartment, and my friend Whitney cooked. (She’s a great cook.)

I didn’t partake too much in the Thanksgiving cooking though. My husband did help in carving it.

I also grabbed a couple recipes from Whitney, one for potatoes and another for green bean casserole. My husband loved them so much that we decided to make them the next day.:)
Here’s the one for the green bean dish:
2 (9 oz) pkgs. of frozen green beans, thawed and drained
3/4 cup sweetened condensed milk
10 3/4 oz. can condensed cream of mushroom soup
1/8 tsp. black pepper
1/2 can (2.8 oz) French fried onions

Pour into 1 1/2 qt. casserole. Bake uncovered at 350 degrees for 30 minutues or until heated. Top with remaining onions. Bake uncovered until golden.

This weekend my three best Grand Forks friends and I got together to make our first pie ever. None of us had ever made a pie from scratch, so we thought it would be a good experience. My friend, Tamara, asked her grandmother for her crust recipe. Grandmothers’ recipes are always the best.:) This one was especially good because it called for a whole slab of lard!
Anyways, my job was cutting the lard into pea-sized slices. I actually was pretty good at that.:)
The one problem we ran into was we didn’t put the lard in with the flour at the beginning. The recipe didn’t say exactly when to throw the lard in. I guess it just assumed we would know. We got some help from Tamara’s sister though, who’s a master chef. Tamara called her up routinely throughout the recipe to make sure we were doing it right.

She explained that we should have thrown the lard in right away with the flour, instead of waiting until the end…so we started all over.

We also struggled with what to mix the dough in because I didn’t have a bowl that was the right size. We decided to use my crock pot. Haha.

Our crust actually turned out great though! We even got the criss-cross technique down. I just observed at that point though.:)

I wouldn’t exactly say pie making was a “piece of cake”….but I sure enjoyed my “piece of pie.”

My husband and I got a crock pot for our wedding a year and a half ago. My husband, Dave, uses it quite often, and his food always turns out really good. I, on the other hand, have not attempted to use it. Dave does such a good job that I didn’t want to make a fool out of myself!
I’ve gotten some help from a couple coworkers though. Jane sent me a link with a whole list of recipes, and Cassie gave me a recipe that’s supposed to be really easy. I decided to start with the “really easy” recipe and was ready to “conquer” my fear of the crock pot.
The night before though Dave starting talking about how I was going to royally mess the recipe up. He pointed out that there were three heat settings on the crock pot, and I wouldn’t know which one to use. He also said that my potatoes would still be hard when everything else would be done.
I decided to prove him wrong. (I wouldn’t let him eat it until the potatoes were cooked through.)

It turned out great! My husband even went back for seconds:)
Here is the recipe I used for the crock pot beef roast:
1 beef roast
1 package carrots
1 packet onion soup mix
1 onion
small red potatoes
2 cans cream of mushroom soup
1/4 of a bottle of red cooking wine
pepper to taste

Put everything in the crock pot and cook on low for four hours and another two hours on high heat.

This past week has been CRAZY…between the elections and breaking news in the region. That’s left little time for me to work on my housewife skills. In fact, I haven’t cooked since the day before Halloween (have had time to do a little shopping though.) You can see where my priorities are.
On Halloween Eve I entertained a group of people. I attempted to make a graveyard cake that I saw on TV, and I thought it was really cute. Check out this link:

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/39875657

My cake didn’t look near as good as the one on TV. It tasted good though. I guess anything with five sticks of butter in it should, right??

I did learn a couple lessons from it.
1. I was supposed to melt white chocolate and then dip pretzel sticks in it to create the look of bones. I saw on the package it said to warm it up in the microwave, but I already had a pan heated up on the stove. I decided just to use the stove then. However, it never melted, but it turned black. I guess my husband says there’s a difference between the microwave and the stove. Who knew? I don’t know if any of you have ever eaten or smelled burnt chocolate, but believe it or not, it’s not good…at all! I wouldn’t recommend it.
2. Only half of the cake got eaten. Next time I’m going to send it home with someone else. My husband actually doesn’t like sweets too much. That means I ate the rest of the cake all by myself. I had it for breakfast, lunch, midnight snacks…etc. I didn’t feel guilty putting the five sticks of butter in it when I thought others were going to eat it, but because I probably ate three of those sticks of butter, I now feel guilty.
I also feel guilty about slacking on my housewife goal so quickly. I’m going to try to cook at least twice this week. That’s a pretty high target though.