The recipe that Robyn and I both made will be posted later this week. The following entry is one that I made specifically for when our tandem post wouldn’t be uploaded on time. And yes, it’s all my fault, as usual. Shirley’s having some out-patient procedures done today and I forgot that she wouldn’t be able to eat anything on Sunday. So I’m waiting to make our recipe later in the week when she’s able to taste-test for me. Rick’s going out of town, too. Should I be nervous that all of the people that I force to eat this stuff are suddenly bailing? – nance
This particular recipe kept showing up on my mother’s Facebook feed and I finally decided to try it just to shut her up about it. Hot dogs, placed inside their buns, and baked in a casserole dish with a bunch of shit on them. Oookay. The recipe is from a facebook page called Food And Everything Else.
You start out by taking a hot dog bun and putting mayonnaise on it. Some people have a preference when it comes to their mayo. As you can see, I stand by Hellmann’s. Y’all can use what you like, I’m not going to judge. I just like how it makes my egg salad turn out. Not that I make a lot of egg salad, but when I do make it I like it with Hellmann’s. Isn’t this a good thing to know? How Nance likes to make her egg salad when she decides to make it every 8 months? I know, right? IMPORTANT information right there.
I decided that I was going to do it exactly like the recipe says so I proceeded to put everything on that damn hot dog bun even if it was something that I felt didn’t belong there (mayonnaise, I’m looking at you).
Please note that I couldn’t even make one of these without making a mess. Something died inside of me when I saw that glob on my casserole dish. I used bun-size hot dogs because I quit buying those short ones that were 10 to a pack when I could only find 8-pack hot dog buns. 8 hot dogs, 8 hot dog buns. It’s the right thing to do. Spell check is insisting that the word is not hotdogs. This is making me very nervous.
With all the condiments all over the buns I had hot dogs flying up out of there when I tried to squeeze them all in the casserole dish. I used the backside of a spoon to push the hot dogs back down into the buns.
We had been in Ohio and since we knew we were going to be making these over the weekend we just got our chili from the Hotdog Shoppe.
It’s right about at this point when I started to realize that I was wasting a whole lot of time making motherfucking chili hot dogs in a casserole dish.
I’m so over it.
As much as I like sharp cheddar cheese, I needed to slip some good ol’ American cheese pieces in there for creaminess. I have no idea why. It just seemed like the right thing to do.
This is what it looked like when it came out of the oven. Eh.
The best photo I could get of the whole damn thing after it was plated. I just love being a pretentious asshole that uses the word “plated” in a blog.
The truth.
I’m noticing more and more that people are passing around the most ridiculous recipes on Facebook and it seems like for every 5 recipes “shared” only 1 of them will turn out like expected. You know what I did up there? I wasted a LOT of time to make a chili hot dog with cheese. Just the construction of the damn casserole was a time-suck. And for what? To eat your damn hot dog with a fork!
Original Source/Author: Food and Everything Else - on Facebook
: Lunch/Dinner
Cuisine: It's hot dogs, for chrissakes!
Serves: 8, I suppose
Ingredients
8 hot dogs
8 hot dog buns
1 can of chili
½ an onion, diced
cheddar cheese
mayonnaise
mustard
sweet relish
Instructions
Line inside of hot dog buns with mayonnaise and sweet relish. (I know this sounds crazy, but the mayo did something magical to the bread! It stayed super soft and yummy!)
Evenly add mustard (I added ketchup too). Fill with hot dogs and squish into a 13×9″ baking pan.
Top hot dogs with chili, cheese, and diced onion. Cover with aluminum foil and bake at 350F for 45 minutes.
Recipe found at Real Simple and changed to suit my tastes.
I love shrimp so very, very much. The only seafood I love more than shrimp is lobster, and every time I visit Maine, I eat every lobster in the state because I love it so. If I were on death row, my last meal request would be lobster and whoopie pies.
But this is about shrimp, not lobster. I like shrimp so much that every time I go to Sam’s, I buy two two-pound bags of frozen jumbo shrimp to keep on hand. When I saw this recipe on Real Simple, I knew I had to give it a try. And I liked it so much that it’s become my shrimp standby – it couldn’t possibly be any easier. (Shrimp Standby would be an excellent band name. Maybe Shrimp Standby with a Lobster Chaser.)
The ingredients:
The recipe as written calls for 1 pound of peeled and deveined medium or large shrimp. I use two pounds of peeled and deveined jumbo shrimp and just double everything else. (They come with tails still on in the bag, in the picture above I’ve thawed the shrimp and removed the tails already.) Also, garlic, salt and pepper, chicken broth, and panko bread crumbs.
Truly, the recipe is simple – preheat the oven, combine the shrimp, garlic, chicken broth (the Real Simple recipe calls for white wine, which I don’t keep on hand), and salt and pepper in a baking dish (I use a 9×13 dish). Then you add the bread crumbs to the top – and this is where I mix it up. The original recipe calls for you to mix panko bread crumbs with softened butter and then top the shrimp with it. I don’t want to use all that butter, so I do one of the following:
1. Use half the amount of butter
OR
2. Use no butter and instead spray the top of the bread crumbs with butter-flavored Pam
OR
3. Mix the bread crumbs with broth until they’re lightly moistened, and sprinkle on top of the shrimp
I opted to do #3 – mix the bread crumbs with broth – this time around, and it worked out just fine.
Shrimp and bread crumbs, headed for the oven.
The shrimp bakes for 15 – 18 minutes, which is just enough time to make angel hair pasta or rice – it’s up to you – to serve the shrimp with.
Did I mention that I love shrimp?
You can share with the cats, but that means less for you!
2 lb peeled and deveined shrimp (I use jumbo; you could also use medium or large)
8 cloves garlic, sliced (I use minced)
4 T chicken broth
salt and black pepper
½ c panko bread crumbs
enough broth to moisten bread crumbs (see notes for additional ideas)
Instructions
Heat oven to 425º. In a baking dish, combine the shrimp, garlic, broth, ½ tsp salt, and ¼ tsp pepper.
In a small bowl, combine the bread crumbs and enough broth to lightly moisten. (see notes for other options)
Sprinkle over the shrimp and bake until the shrimp are opaque throughout, 15 - 18 minutes.
Notes
If you prefer to go ahead and use butter instead of broth to moisten the bread crumbs, use ¼ c. softened butter.
OR
Use neither broth nor butter - after sprinkling the dry bread crumbs on top of the shrimp, spray with butter flavored Pam.
Every Monday, we’ll post a recipe that we both made. This week’s recipe was from Chelsea at Mmm…Cafe.
Nance’s take:
This week it was Robyn’s turn to pick the recipe. I was kind of nervous because I’m well aware that Robyn is a huge lover of vegetables. Now my favorite vegetable is corn (with lots of butter) with my second being potatoes (also with lots of butter). Robyn eats stuff like squash and okra on a regular basis (and she doesn’t even have the sense to deep fry it). I think you get where I’m coming from here. One of us is way more healthier than the other. Ahem. I was also in a tizzy because the only rule (for lack of a better word) that I dictated about this venture is no seafood (I hate seafood more than I hate my ex-husband and that’s saying some shit). Now before you all get yourselves into a snit please note that the rule is only for the tandem recipes. Miz Robyn may post as many seafood recipes as she would want on here. She just can’t make me cook them. Heh.
So the first recipe that Robyn threw at me: Some kind of garlic shrimp mess and OHHELLNO! I suppose I should add that I didn’t tell Robyn of the no seafood rule because I figured she would already know that…because we’re friends and friends don’t let friends eat stuff that lives in its own toilet! Some friend she is. Hmph.
After a flurry of emails denouncing seafood, etc., she sent me her second choice recipe. Honey Sauced Chicken. I was all happy because I like honey and I like chicken! And then I saw the soy sauce and I was all, “Oh, barf!” But I decided to suck it up because nobody likes a big baby (or a picky eater). Wah, wah, wah.
I’m one of those knuckleheads that only reads the ingredient list when looking at a recipe. The other stuff is what happens when you actually go to make it. So I never realized that it was supposed to be made in a crock-pot until about 5:30. Oops! Fortunately, she includes instructions on how to make it a 30 minute meal. So that’s what I did.
There are days when things that I do in the kitchen are effortless. And then there are days when it has to be a todo. Can you guess what day this was? I’ll give you a hint. Iced tea AND coffee cup sitting in my area. I was obviously having a time of it. And things didn’t get any better once I realized that I sprayed my dish with Pam…for baking! I wiped it out and started over. Sigh. The recipe doesn’t even call for doing that, but I wasn’t about to have a sticky (hello, honey!) mess all burned up in my dish (I tend to ignore things once I put them in the oven, including the oven timer at times, heh) so I took the extra precaution.
I also doubled the recipe (there are four of us eating). We (and by we I mean Rick because he’s the resident math dork over here) figured out that 3/4 of a pound of chicken doubled would be about two of those giant chicken breasts you get at Sam’s club.
I was an adult before I liked honey. Isn’t it weird how your taste changes over the years?
This is what it looked like before I put it in the oven. I have to admit I was a little nervous because I had visions of serving up a hearty bowl of soy soup.
I spooned it over rice and was pretty dubious about the whole mess because the sauce had not thickened like I expected it to. I had it in my head that it was going to be like Chinese take-out Sweet and Sour chicken. I then remembered once eating General Tso’s chicken over shredded lettuce so I decided to try it that way.
It was FABULOUS. And the rice eaters loved it too! Everyone agreed that it should go into our family meal rotation and that right there is a freaking miracle!
Okay, look. To be fair, when I suggested the garlic shrimp recipe to Nance, I DID say “I know you hate seafood, so probably not this one?”
I’m pretty sure that “lover of vegetables” is going to need to go on my tombstone because that cracked me up. I have a friend (this is not Nance I’m talking about, for the record) who eats vegetables so rarely that when she does, it’s a noteworthy event and a couple of weeks ago she posted on Facebook that she’d eaten a salad for dinner and we were all “!!!!!!!!!!!!!” Also, she loathes peas and considers their existence to be a personal affront.
Anyway.
I have a habit of seeing a recipe that looks interesting to me, and printing it out. I have a stack of recipes at least six inches high, dating back three or four years (every so often I go through them and admit that there are several that I’m never going to make), and so when it was my turn to choose a recipe, I grabbed my stack and picked one I thought Nance might be okay with.
(Fred is not super crazy about soy sauce, and since Nance and Fred think alike about MANY things – I’m pretty sure they were separated at birth – I wasn’t sure Nance would go for it. But she decided to be adventurous!)
Your ingredients:
I’d already chopped up the chicken (and salt and peppered it) earlier in the day because I like to get the annoying prep stuff done beforehand. 3/4 pounds of chicken breasts equaled three chicken breasts from our (free-range) chickens. You’ve also got honey (the big-ass bottle from Sam’s. How often do I use honey? How many years do you think I’ll be using honey from that bottle, for god’s sake? It’s already at least a year old! I love Sam’s, but there are some things a two-person household doesn’t really need to buy in bulk). There’s soy sauce, 1/8 cup chopped onion, ketchup, minced garlic, red pepper flakes, and the big-ass bottle of olive oil from Sam’s. The recipe calls for vegetable oil, but the generic “vegetable oil” we have on hand smells funny so I opted for the olive oil.
This recipe really could not be easier – put the chicken in the baking dish, mix up the sauce and pour it over, stick the whole thing in the oven.
(The recipe I printed out has crock pot instructions, but I’m trying to convince y’all that I can make dinner without using the crock pot, so I opted for the oven instructions.)
I hate handling raw chicken, by the way. It ooks me out.
Bake for 10 minutes, stir it, bake another 10, and voila it is ready. We had ours over angel hair.
Fred’s not a huge fan of rice, he’ll always prefer pasta if given the choice. I really like Nance’s idea of eating it over chopped lettuce and will probably give that a try next time around.
I really liked this a lot – Fred, on the other hand, was more lukewarm about it. I think he might like it more if the sauce was thicker, so next time I make it I’m going to add some cornstarch to the sauce and see if I can’t get it to thicken up a bit. If I can’t get him to like it as much as I do, I’ll likely add it to my own personal rotation and eat it for lunches during the week. Two thumbs up from me, and a “Meh” from Fred, that picky motherfucker.
Robyn & Nance try the same recipe - Honey Sauced Chicken
