Get out of that same ol’ recipe rut and try one of these delicious and easy recipes this week! This week I highly recommend making the Sheet Pan Smoked Kielbasa with Herbed Potatoes and Green Beans and the Double Chocolate Flourless Brownies!
Happy Sunday TKW Family! Brrrr it’s finally cold here in Pittsburgh! We still haven’t had snow yet; just a few flurries. But did you see that Atlanta got something like 9″ the other day. North Carolina as well got hit with snow yet we, who live in the snow belt got squat. Oh trust me, I’m not complaining as folks around here honestly can’t drive in snow. I mean I can get it if you’re new to the area and never had to deal with driving in snow but when folks who’ve grown up here, know the type of snow that we get and still do not get snow tires, kills me. I’m a truck girl but even if you have 4-wheeled drive and your butt is driving with summer tires, my car with snow tires will handle better in the snow. But I digress – ATL and NC – love you guys but you can keep the snow! Merry Christmas! LOL
Last week…. God what a blur. When you work in IT, there really is no down time. While most companies slow down around the holidays, IT never sleeps or stops. Even though we’re going into a code freeze (which means no production changes can be pushed through for 4 weeks), this is my super, SUPER busy time. I have to map out my projects for the next year, define my strategies and define the road map. Oh yeah, all the while fitting in my end of the year vacation. But I can’t complain too much as I have a job and more importantly I have a job that I actually really love.
Thursday night was an eventful night in my house. With us both being engineers we can never do things easy. We have to analyze stuff (to death), bring out our calculators, engineering paper and honestly, if we had a whiteboard in the room, that would have been brought out too. You see we’re finally at the point where we can start decorating (and using) the media and billiard room. Which meant we needed to buy a tv. We bought the tv and it was to be delivered the next day. Us, being us, we had to calculate the optimal viewing angle and distance for a 75″ tv. It got bad – like 3 hours bad. We literally broke it down to writing out equations trying to find the tangent and tilt ratios of the tv. 3 hours…
In the end, Best Buy came and installed the tv per our specs only we questioned ourselves at the last minute and had them install it 2″ higher than we agreed on. Yeah… guess who gets to take the tv off the wall and move the bracket down to our original specs? Engineers man – we never can do things easy!
So last week I was in a chili-type of mood however I wanted to mix it up and put almost a bbq’d spin on it. Full disclosure: Mr. Fantabulous HATED this as he said “it tastes like you mixed bbq and chili together.” Um…. yeah that’s what I was going for. I absolutely LOVE it! It’s my Cowboy BBQ Beef & Bacon Chili. Now I had every intention of posting the recipe yesterday but this weekend was anything but easy. I’ll post it this week.
So yeah, I had every intention of posting that recipe (once I completed the photo shoot) on Saturday but that didn’t happen (obviously). Saturday started out like any normal Saturday (minus the running errands). I had my list of what I had to get done and what we had to do together. My boss was having her annual Christmas party which I was looking forward to. I had just started working on my first recipe of the day for a new client when I heard that phrase that makes me cringe…
“Honey, can you come help me for a minute?” which translates to “just shut everything off in the kitchen, put the food away as you’re going to be with me for a few hours” in Mr. Fantabulous speak. Apparently one of water filtration canisters started to leak in the utility room. It wasn’t a bad leak but when you just completed putting in new plaster and 4,000′ sqft of hickory flooring, you run. Now this canister isn’t small – it’s about 5″ high, maybe 2″ in diameter and, when filled, weighs at least 150 lbs. You put this type of gravel in the bottom, then some type of media filter and then something else. Then you fill it to the top with water. Since we have a well, we run it through this double filtration/osmosis system that turns it into incredible fresh drinking water. It wasn’t cheap to put in (thankfully the previous homeowners had a ridiculous amount of money and put it in). All we have to do is maintain it.
So he takes off the top, I wipe up the little bit of water that got on the concrete floor in the room and we’re good to go…. or so I thought. I’ll spare you the boring details (as well as the slew of curse words I spouted), but 7 hours, YES 7 hours later, we (okay he) finally got it fixed. It involved emptying out the water (which you had to use a syphon hose), then he had to try to pick up this thing, with wet sand/media/rocks on it and try to dump it out. Yeah… wet sand and media does not simply dump out. I had to fish my hand into this small opening to try to scoop it out only the opening wasn’t large enough to get my hand in so I literally had to use my finger tips. Needless to say tempers were hot and I was so over that thing. But, finally we got it emptied, he cleaned it out, replaced the seals and it’s all good now.
But what that meant was EVERYTHING I had to get done yesterday – yeah nothing got done. And since we didn’t finish until almost 8pm, we didn’t end up going to my boss’ holiday party. Which is something you shouldn’t ever miss – know what I mean? I sent her a text with a picture of what we were doing but haven’t heard back. Hopefully she’s not too mad but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. So today once I finish this post I’m off to the kitchen to do everything I had to get done yesterday plus my work for today and also log into my real job.
Someone wealthy want to adopt me (or finance a cooking school/bistro?) Someday… I keep thinking “God didn’t give me these talents for no reason. I’m meant to use them.” I can’t dance and I’m not athletic but what I am gifted in is intelligence and the whole cooking/baking/chef thing. LOL
Anyways guys, I need to get going. These recipes aren’t going to make themselves. With that, have one fantabulously amazing week!
♥ Monday – Pressure Cooker for these wings with a Bourbon Honey BBQ Sauce
♥ Tuesday – Eggs Benedict
♥ Wednesday – Sheet Pan Smoked Kielbasa with Herbed Potatoes and Green Beans
♥ Thursday – Coconut Panko Crusted Baked Tilapia
♥ Friday – Ham & Cheese Flatbread Pizza
♥ Saturday – Cherry Chipotle Cola Pork Tenderloin
♥ Sunday – Sunday Frittata
♥ Dessert of the week – Double Chocolate Flourless Brownies
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