There’s a couple milestones to acknowledge today.

First, my husband and I have now been married for 6 months. That’s half a year. And it’s been great. I’m glad to be married to you, honey. You’re the best man I’ve ever known.

Second, my blog just reached 500 total hits! YEEHAW!!! I know that’s lots and lots of clicks from just a few people, all of whom I know personally, but there’s some of you I’ve never even met that are reading this thing. How awesome is that!

There’s always stuff I want that I don’t have. Now that we’ve got this great point & shoot little camera, I’m thinkin how great it would be to have a digital SLR, and then wouldn’t it be great to have Photoshop so I could do some real editing of my photos. Oh, and while we’re at it, how about a new Kitchenaid Mixer, granite countertops, and 3000 square feet of kitchen space, of course with lots and lots of natural light.

As my husband says, when he’s feeling a little feisty, “It’s good to want things.”

So in the meantime, I’m actually pretty pleased with the results from our new little point & shoot. No touching up or recoloring at all.

By the way, anyone know what kind of plant this is?

Perusing through the archives of my husband’s blog, I just realized I was not the first to blog a recipe in this relationship! Jeremy posted this deliciously manly (read: fattening) recipe under the title “Simple Hungry Man Recipes: Bacon Chicken Mushroom Tomato Sandwich.” Well, I have no shame, and I’m going to repost it here, since my lazy ass hasn’t been cooking anything all week, and this concoction sounds mighty good right about now.

This simple, hungry-man recipe should please even the manliest of men.

Here it is, in the words of my husband:

Bacon, Chicken, Mushroom, and Tomato Sandwich, or BCMT

I love pig in the form of bacon. It’s easy to cook, and when cooked first, creates a scrumptious pan greasing forming the basis of a filling, cardiac arresting help-I-need-an-artery-drill meal.

Non-warning: If you know you shouldn’t eat fattening food, you won’t listen to my warnings about how bad this meal is for you, so I won’t pretend to be your mother and scold you for drooling over this. For those of you on the opposite end of the spectrum who look like Skeletor, put down that cigarette and wrap that apron around your 10″ waist. Time to fatten your skinny ass up. (And if you’re a really skinny woman, remember some of us guys like some meat between the skin and bone we put into our mouths. Eat two of these, please, for the love of Karen Carpenter.)

Simple I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-A-Recipe for BCMT

• 1 Lb. of High Quality Pig Bacon (No Beggin’ Strips, no pre-cooked bacon, and please please don’t even think porkofu.)
• 2 pieces of boneless Organic Chicken Thigh Meat
• 2 Handfuls of Mushrooms, or two big Portabella mushrooms
• 4 slices of bread (yipee for gluten free bread that actually tastes good)
• 2 fat slices of your favorite cheese. I recommend an aged white cheddar.
• 1 organic sliced tomato

Ideally Optional Ingredient

• 1 Really black, super seasoned iron skillet

To prepare:

1. Perform any celebratory dance you like over your fresh meat.

2. Prepare your skillet. If you’re using iron, pre-heat that baby to a medium temperature for about a minute.

3. Lay the bacon out in the skillet. (Remember, undercooked pork = trichinosis. Cook your meat.)

4. Cook all bacon, and leave bacon grease in the skillet.

5. Put cooked bacon aside.

6. Gently place chicken into the skillet with the bacon grease. Cook the chicken until done. (If you actually needed that warning about trichinosis, here’s your warning to avoid an E.Coli pie of undercooked chicken.)

7. Remove chicken when cooking is complete. The chicken shouldn’t have any pink coloring left in the meat.

8. Put the mushrooms in remaining bacon-chicken grease in skillet.

9. Remove cooked limp, brown mushrooms.

10. Drop tomatoes into bacon-chicken-mushroom drippings in skillet and cook.

11. Remove tomatoes, place cheese into bacon-chicken-mushroom-tomato drippings in skillet and cook. If you’ve never fried cheese like this, it’s not hard. Just make sure that you have a good spatula ready to scrape the cheese off your skillet.

12. Remove cooked cheese and place on top of the chicken thighs.

13. Place bread in the skillet with the bacon-chicken-mushroom-tomato-cheese drippings and cook. Rub bread around, collect all drippings.

14. Once the bread is fried to your liking, layer sandwich in this order: bread, chicken with cheese, tomatoes, bacon, bread. Repeat.

Recipe makes two sandwiches.

Since I’ve been hecka lazy about cooking for the last few days, I figured I should post about something. What with my husband participating in NaNoWriMo, and all sorts of bloggers posting away for NaBloPoMo, I’m starting to feel guilty. So here’s a topic I love to share, and hell, it’s even food-related!

Anyone who knows me has probably heard me talk about my wedding at some point or another. My husband and I were vehemently opposed to going back into the depths of credit card debt that we’d been working so hard to clamber our way out of, just to feed a bunch of our friends and family some fancy food that probably wouldn’t be nearly worth the price per head that it would cost us. We were lucky enough to have some very generous friends donate the use of their backyard for our wedding and reception, so it just seemed all-around appropriate to have a potluck wedding reception. I highly recommend this to everyone!

Here’s what the buffet table looked like:

The friends whose backyard we were using had the brilliant idea of hiring a couple of servers to collect people’s potluck contributions on their way in, and then the servers managed everything getting plated, heated, and rotated appropriately. So this is just one snapshot of the buffet table, as it evolved throughout the evening.

If you’re looking carefully, you may be wondering about the brown items in the middle of the table. Yes, that is Chocolate-Covered Bacon. With Sprinkles. You’d actually be surprised, this concoction had it’s admirers. And no, not just the family dog, they don’t even have a dog. This fabulous dish was courtesy of Jeremy’s friend Matthew, and it served it’s purpose as the fulfillment of a drunken dream of the best food in the world. (It actually was kinda good.)

In addition to the buffet, we were lucky enough to have a friend make our wedding cake:

And another friend did the flowers (including those on the cake):

Let me just say, I highly recommend doing your wedding this way. Even if you have to pay for a cake and a florist, the potluck adds such a community feel to the event. Everyone gets to show off their favorite dish, and share in good food with friends and family.

Pictures taken by George Paginini and Jayanti Anand.

The Hub and I are drinking wine and watching Ghost tonight.

Carl Bruner just dumped coffee on his shirt so that he could expose smooth tanned muscles to a bereaved Demi Moore.

Classic.

Hubby and I baked a whole chicken last night, always the beginning of a delicious journey as the carcass is turned into stock, which is then turned into some kind of soup. (I’m not the only one who loves the carcass, either.) Our version is really simple, and I think making your own stock is one of those things that is pretty difficult to f*** up, as long as you’ve got a little sense.

As you boil the bones, the gelatin comes out of them, which is what makes your homemade stock solidify after it’s been in the fridge, but what also gives it that rich velvety texture when it’s hot.

Chicken Stock

• Chicken Carcass
• Veggies and Herbs (Carrots, onions, and celery are basics. The leaves of the celery add extra flavor, and our favorite herb with chicken is rosemary. )

Throw in some salt, pepper, herbs, whatever you’ve got on hand, and simmer it all together for a couple of hours. Then strain out the solids and put the liquid in the fridge overnight, so you can skim the fat off the top the next day.

I like to freeze a few containers for future use.

Commence making delicious soups, stews, risottos, and whatever else your little heart desires.

I wasn’t planning to use my blog for rants, as I have a tendency to avoid things I think would look self-indulgent or make me look like I think I’m more important than I am. I don’t know where I got that, especially because I’m one of the biggest smarty-pants around, and I just about always think I really do know better than you or anyone else. (Just ask my husband, who, glowingly generous soul that he is, receives the brunt of my helpful suggestions, useful tidbits, and “no, sweetie, I’m right-you’re wrong” patronizing attitude.)

But I’ve just discovered Dooce, and she’s hilarious and cranky and witty and vulnerable, and then this thing happened today, and I was (inspired?… driven?) to write about it.

So here is the ridiculousness that I want to speak my mind on:

I ordered RECYCLED paper towels for work from Costco.com. Three packs of 6 rolls each. I do my best to keep our office as environmentally friendly as possible. We have these expensive water filters so people don’t use so many single-serve bottles, I hardly buy anything disposable that’s not recycled, you get the picture. I’d rather we didn’t use paper towels at all and people just carried around cloths like the No Impact guy, but the folks at work wouldn’t be havin’ it, so I concede and order RECYCLED paper towels. So, back to the matter at hand, the Costco guy brings in the items from the truck individually, cases of soda, big bags of trail mix (I order the big bag and make people share because it uses less packaging). And then he brings in 3 boxes. Each one is sealed up with ONE of the packs of paper towels, and 4 of those bubbly air bag packaging thingys. You know, to protect the paper towels. Because they might get dented.

Jesus, people. I’m trying to REDUCE my carbon footprint here.

I know there wasn’t just one person involved in the inane decision to send my paper towels in an obscene amount of protective packaging, but if there was, I want to pour organic earth-friendly sugar into the gas tank of their gigantic SUV.