Is it summer yet?

So, a lot of the things John and I have been eating lately haven't been very blogable. You might say we're in the Feburary blahs...or blahgs...or what have you. I've got the itch for it to be summer already, so we can go swimming in the Great Lakes and visit people we like in America.

















Instead, here's a less than thrilling list of things that have been going on, including some cooking failures.

We tried to make these Crash Hot Potatoes. Problem: I don't own a potato masher. Turns out that was a key tool. I may try to make them while we're in Fort Wayne next week, because they look delicious.

John and I had a couple of friends over to watch Miss America. I made red velvet cakes, which I already told you about, and I also tried to make cream cheese-stuffed jalapeno peppers, wrapped in bacon.




















Epic fail. It turns out that vegan cream cheese and regular cream cheese act really differently when heated up. Vegan cream cheese is great in grits, but doesn't do the trick when baked inside a pepper. It kind of melted into a marshmallow-like paste, and didn't cut the heat of the peppers at all, rendering them inedible. Blech.




























But sometimes I improve something and it goes really right! I made this smoothie with frozen strawberries, mangos, and blue berries, added non-fat, plain yogurt, and a little apple juice. What came out of the blender was sort of like a lazy man's sorbet. I don't have an ice cream maker (yet), so this is as close as I can get in my kitchen so far, and it's delicious.


John and I have been having breakfast for dinner about once a week for the past month. Yesterday we had Edna Mae's Sour Cream Pancakes from Pioneer Woman's cookbook, and we ate all of them before I could even get a good picture. Thumbs up.


This week I got a cold, and we're heading out of town next weekend, so the food in our kitchen has been decidedly unfancy lately. Hopefully we'll come back from Fort Wayne refreshed and ready to charge on with the rest of the semester. And, since we'll be hanging out with my parents, we're almost guaranteed to make some blogable dinners, and I'll share them as soon as I can.

Side note: John and I are already gearing up for our Epic Summer Road Tripstravaganza Oh-Ten! You can read about the recording equipment he's been ordering (on UWO's dime) on his new music blog, here. We're going to try some of it out in Fort Wayne and make a mock version of This American Life. Stay tuned.