Darek + Stacie

One last old saved draft post (is anyone still even looking at this?). I actually have been taking photos of the day, but we’re having problems with our card reader so I’m a little stuck with that. I’ve always wanted to make cheesecake, so I was excited to find a spring form pan at Ikea. The crust was crushed-up oreos: If you’ve ever wondered what cheesecake really is, it’s just several blocks of cream cheese: Blending a few other things with the cream cheese: Before going in the oven: The best part: The finished product: Unfortunately I didn’t pre-read the instructions very carefully and didn’t allow enough refrigerator time after baking, so the consistency was very mushy. But it tasted really good – albeit super rich – as long as you didn’t get a piece of foil in your slice. I’d say for our first cheesecake attempt, it was pretty good. Recipe link for reese’s chocolate peanut butter cup cheesecake

Still have a few things to post from last year.

Some of the ingredients (artichokes, garlic, wine):

The cooking process:

The finished product:

I wrote 4 stars on this recipe. We made it so long ago I really don’t remember, but it must have been pretty good. We left out the olives; I do remember that.

Recipe: Mediterranean Chicken and Pasta

OK so maybe not technically a new recipe per say, put it did make a different kind of pizza. A crispy one – yum. It was pretty easy.

We rolled out the dough and put it on the grill:

When the bottom starts to get a tiny bit charred, put the dough on something else, flip it over, and add the toppings.

Then it goes back on grill (uncooked dough side down, cooked side with toppings up):

A little messy to make, but totally worth it:

I love pizza.

We tried this one because I liked the picture in the magazine. I’m a sucker for anything with bowtie pasta. I just think it looks pretty and therefore tasty.

Grilling the veggies:

Grilled:

Tomatoes in various stages of slicing:

Veggies cut up and mixed together:

And everything all together:

“Hey, that’s not farfalle/bowtie pasta!” you may be saying. That’s true. I can’t find whole wheat bowtie pasta and we try to only eat whole wheat pasta, so we used rotini instead (thus defeating the whole point of why I wanted to try the recipe). We also added grilled chicken to our version, which was good.

The recipe suggested adding fresh basil, mint, or dill. Unfortunately we used some of the leftover dill from our gyros and killed the flavor of this recipe. Dill is strong. It’s good in Tzatziki sauce but I wasn’t a fan of it in this.

I’d try this recipe again but definitely without the dill. I definitely don’t recommend dill. Unless you like dill. And tasting dill for hours afterward. More power to you.

Click here for the recipe. But skip the dill.

Hello.

A couple of months ago I just sort of snapped, and gave up on some stuff (like blogging here). I’m getting back on track, slowly. Finally thought about this for the first time in a long time…Turns out I had several posts ready in draft form.

Back to it, then.

We ate good in June. I’ll save you the suspense on this one and just tell you up front: it was AMAZING. Yum yum. When we visited my sister in Seattle we had some delicious chicken gyro sandwiches, and wanted to try to make something similar at home. I was excited to find this recipe.

I don’t have a lot of in-the-making pictures because darek pretty much made this one alone while I was at a loooong wedding rehearsal far far away in South Dallas which I didn’t bother to get very good directions for.

Anyway. Here are the chicken and flatbreads on the grill (no we did NOT eat all that chicken in one night):

With the toppings (Tzatziki sauce not pictured):

The finished product:

Super awesome. We will definitely be making these again. The leftovers were great as well.

Click here for the recipe.