Where would you put it?

I started a little recipe contest a few weeks ago, and a contest for free flower delivery a few days ago, and today is the day to announce the winners.

First, the recipe contest.  Wowzas, there were a lot of entries. Note to self: Don’t start a diet right after you start a recipe contest.  Or do, if you are into torture.  I used that randomizer thing to pick 3 entries and came up with these, and then I made them.  Truth be told, I made lots of others, too, but we JUDGED these:

• Easy Peasy Meatloaf by One More Fairy Tale
• Burrito Pie by Cuz I’m the Mom (do you have a blog, yo?)
• Cream Cheese Cherry Danish by Adventures in JujuBoo

The meatloaf?  I honestly like the flavor of mine better, but here’s the thing:  Mine takes hours. This one took about 5 minutes to prep, 30 to bake, and when I asked my kids over dinner whether they like that one or mine better, they said, “Dude, mom, totally this one.”  That kicks ass.

The Burrito Pie?  Couldn’t have been a better fit.  Did I ever tell you I can’t make casserole?  I have no clue how to make one, no recipes for one, and nothing would fulfill my white picket fence suburban dream like the ability to bust out a nice casserole.  Also, a drug habit.  Bygones.  So I made it, and I ate it even though it has tortillas in it and therefore totally a diet cheat.  And I loved every single bite.

The danish?  Why the hell do you think I’m on a diet now, anyway?  I let 1of3 make it for our Thanksgiving dinner, we just subbed apple pie filling for the cherry since cherry anything is my short ticket to an early grave.  And then we made it again a few days later.  And again the next week.  And I dream about it, I really do.

But, I can only pick one winner, because, well, until I get a fucking job, I really can’t run around buying a bunch of strangers presents.  As hard as it was to pick, I had to go with the Burrito Pie*.  I mean, look at it.

It was super easy, crazy freaking delicious, cheap ass all hell to make, and the kicker?  Every. Single. Person. in this house devoured it.  No one didn’t like it, no one at all, not even the kid who looks like she’s about to kill me.  And that almost never happens around here.

So, Cuz I’m the Mommy, send me your address so I can send you a gift (and maybe a hint as to what sort of kitchen thing you’d like to have), and Lisa and The Real Life Fairy Tale Princess, I have to at least mail you a mixtape or something, so send me yours, too, if you don’t mind.

As to the flowers from Flora2000?  Well, you people ALL need lots and lots of flowers.  Except for Tanis; she needs to make her husband give husband lessons.  Here’s how it worked: I picked one winner and I randomized one winner.  I wanted to pick Surfer Jay, because his comment made me about pee in my pants.

The most selfless thing I’ve ever done for my mother in law was to get her daughter knocked-up. I mean really knocked-right-up. Selfless indeed. After all, what mother-in-law wouldn’t want to become a grandmother?

Yes, dude, I know what you mean.  Someone did that to me, once, too.  *gigglegiggle*  I wanted to pick Kori, because god knows she could use them right now, but I had to go with Sophie at Inzaburbs.  Because, yeah, her husband is not even as smart as mine.

It’s simple. It’s me who deserves the flowers. Why?  Because (although he is, of course, perfect in every other way) my husband has never bought me flowers. Ever. He did bring me flowers once. He fished them out of the trash can at work because they “still had some life left in them”.

That’s totally worse than finding half a worm in your apple.  That’s just, uuuuugh.  Buy yourself something nice, honey.  Something not covered in coffee grinds and rotting broccoli.  The radomizer thing picked Hockeyman, who is a JERK who sent me a recipe for Key Lime Pie in the comments of the I’m On A Diet post.  He hates me, and he’d getting flowers.  He’d better send them to his wife.

Thanks to everyone who entered, and really, if you need a recipe for anything, take a look at that link sheet and dig through the comments.  There’s some mind-numblingly good stuff in there.

In case you didn’t win anything, I offer you this:

That is my daughter’s room.  We spent hours the day before sorting through every Barbie shoe, every barrette, and putting 8 bazillion tiny little things in their proper drawers and cubbies.  The next morning, I woke up to that.  This.

See, I lost, too.  Badly.  Apparently, if you have everything, you can just throw it in my kid’s room.

*Recipe after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not Saturday, and it won’t be Saturday all day today, but here I am posting a Super Saturday Supper recipe on top of a Weekly Winners post.  I have an excellent excuse…I re started a diet two weeks ago.

Do you know when you start that low-carb diet, how they tell you to lay off the booze for a while?  Do you know why?  It’s not because booze is packed with sugar, it’s because proteins do not absorb vodka as well as a bowl of pasta would, and if you decide to sit down with a good movie and a rather large glass full of your favorite cocktail, you probably won’t remember much between your third slurp, the bird’s eye view of your toilet, and your pillow.

However, being O+, I function much better in life if I drop the carbs.  Too bad I’d rather have mashed potatoes than oxygen.  Sucks to be me, yo.  But when I stepped on the scale two Sundays ago, a year and a half after rocking some very hot size 4 jeans and saw 160?  I decided to break up with Ding Dongs.

So, here I sit, down 10 pounds already, watching JFK on the tv (45 years already?  Dag) trying really hard to will myself out of a wicked hangover, and posting this a day late.  Maybe I should get to that already, huh?

Chicken Parmesan is my mostest favoritest dinner in the whole freaking world.  Not so totally compatible with a low carb diet, though, unless you tweak it a bit.  You dredge chicken breasts pounded thin (or sliced in half through the middle, I’m lazy) in eggs and flour.

Normally, you’d also dredge them through breadcrumbs, but I had to leave out the bread crumbs *sob* so I subbed them with grated parm (just the Kraft stuff), salt and pepper, and extra basil and oregano.

By the way, it’s really nice to hide yourself little messages in your kitchen that will totally crack you up when you stumble on them later.

You fry those chicken breasts in a pan with hot olive oil until they are JUST done, no more than that.  After that, you load the chicken breasts into a 9X13 glass pan, pile them up with marinara and cheese (I use that 4 cheese Italian pre-grated blend, also lazy)

and bake them until the cheese is really melted and a little brown on top, maybe 10 minutes?  Since I’m on that stupid diet, I didn’t make the pot of pasta I’d usually throw under the chicken before I served it, I just made green beans instead.  And you know what?

It kicked ASS.  See all Lotus’ Weekly Winners here, and all the Super Saturday Suppers recipes here.

67 years ago today, a baby girl was born in Zanesville, Ohio, who would change my whole life.  See, that girl would grow up to be a college student who met a football player, and they totally did it.  Three times, in fact.  And thanks to her, I have someone to talk shit about on my blog.

My husband is really great.  I’m just going to say that now and get it out of the way so he doesn’t kill me when he reads this.

That motherfucker never buys me flowers.  EVER.  I mean, come on.  Three of your spawn carved their initials in the walls of my uterus, homie.  Would it kill you to throw a rose my way once in a while?

He’s going to say, “Shut up, ho, I totally give you flowers.”  And I’m going to follow that with a, “Whatever, hosehead.”  It’s not that he doesn’t ever, really, I guess.  It’s just that his delivery is all wrong.

Example:  Pick a Valentine’s Day, any Valentine’s Day.  The routine is he gets up, has some coffee, opens the fridge, says, “Oh crap, we’re low on milk!  I’ll be right back!”, hops in the car and comes home an hour later from Safeway with the very last flower arrangement they had crammed in the back of the cooler right next to the milk, which consists of one near-frozen rose, about 8 tons of baby’s breath, and some asparagus because someone bought all the bamboo stalks.  But at least he tried.

But there was this one year, and oh lord, he actually outdid himself.  He came home from work the night before my birthday with ohmygod this bouquet of flowers.  I can’t even tell you the flowers.  The thing was bigger than my torso (no small feat).  There were lilies and roses and shit I ain’t nevah seen before.  It was actually arranged. The vase was this ginormous round glass bowl, so you could see all the stalks.  It was To. Die. For.  I don’t think I have ever loved a gift more from him.  Like, I called his MOTHER to tell her about it, that’s how happy I was.  Like, I’m pretty sure I had sex with him because of it, too.  THAT GOOD.

For a few days, I was totally thrilled.  I suppose I harped on it a little too much, made too big a deal out of it, was too happy that he’d totally wasted what was obviously a buttload of money on me, because he started trying to disclaimer it, like he was hurt that I was so overly happy about one bouquet of flowers or something.  He’d start in with, “Well, I just grabbed it fr…” SHUT UP, DUDE.  Do NOT ruin this for me.  A bit later he’d say, “It’s just some stupid thing I..” UH UH.  No you don’t, fool.  He kept it up until one moment, when I didn’t catch him in time, and what does that moron blurt out?

“It was JUST a left-over bouquet from a function at work, that’s all!”

Oh, no he didn’t.  He did not tell me that he grabbed something off a table at work and gave it to me as my gift, did he?  Yes, yes he did.  That was information I could have gone my WHOLE LIFE not knowing.  Talk about a buzz kill, yo.  I’m pretty sure I un-had sex with him that night.

Point is, though he totally provides for my every need, buys me awesome Christmas gifts, gave me a shiny new laptop just because, and does not throw anything at me when he has to spend his one day a week off washing the laundry I was too busy blogging to get to, he sucks at flowers.  And flowers are the key to any woman’s heart, I don’t care who tells you what.  Diamonds are for cutting glass, that’s it.

There’s more, but it’s at my review blog, and I’m all about giving you the option to pass on that, so follow if you like, don’t if you don’t, but I actually have a little something to give away, in case you’re interested.  And no nudity this time, sorry.  Or you’re welcome, depending.

I am posting to say I’m not posting.  Because that makes loads of sense.

I just got kind of busy, what with this new thing I have going on the side:

Guess who gets to do something with all those political posts that she’s way too afraid to mention here finally?  ME, that’s who.  The whole Blog Nosh thing is like, well, it’s an online magazine, sure, but my job is to post other people’s stuff.  It’s a mix of all those great posts people write and not enough people ever get to read.

I don’t have any of the posts I’ve chosen for publication up yet, but I will soon.  They’re chillaxin’ in the queue.  In the meantime, there’s a buttload of awesomeness over there, so go.  Scoot. There’s nothing happening here today.  And if you just so happen to know of some really mind blowing political posts, yours or someone else’s, totally send me the link, yo.

Okay, so a CT scan is NOTHING like the Google search hits told me it would be.  There are no bindings, leather or otherwise.  There are no large, burly people.  It doesn’t feel even moderately dangerous.  No one yells at you to lay there and take it.  Marylin Manson is not bumping through the stereo in a dimly lit room, there isn’t even any lub….

*ahem*

I had a totally freaking coronary about the fact that I had no sitter for my kids.  My neighbor had agreed to be “on call” for my 10 year old, and he agreed to be paid $5 to watch his sister while I was gone.  Now, I’m a pretty crappy mom, but I haven’t sunk that low just yet.  Yet.

So everyone piled in the car with every toy we could cram into a Dora backpack, and off we went to explore the wonders of the Canadian Waiting Room System.  Where there were toys, other people, and a wheelchair.  Yep, they would be just fine.

So, they called me back and thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster I didn’t bother wearing my sexy underwear, because this is what they handed me to put on.

When they say that one size fits all, they’re not kidding.  I could have put everyone in those pants.  Hey, did you know that 90% of the time, if you hover over my pictures, a love letter appears?  Try it, you’ll like it.

And then, the moment of truth.  Also called, the moment I chickened out and could not bring myself to ask for permission to take pictures.  Because I try not to be a freak.  In real life.  Bygones.  I climbed onto the table and they slid me into the donut thing that had a shocking lack of powdered sugar on it anywhere, and we began.

You know in that movie Contact, when they finally build the secret alien swirling vortex thing, and Jodi Foster climbs inside of it and it’s all whooooop….whoooop….whoooop until it starts spinning really fast and going whoopwhoopwhoopwhoopwhoop then the walls drip away and she is shot headfirst through what I imagine is an exact replica of the inside of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s penis and then she lands in the middle of a Monet painting, on crack, and her dead father is there to greet her or something and then it’s back through the Amazing Technocolor Dream Urethra and *poof*?  No one saw a thing but her?

Yeah, it was nothing like that.  Except the whooping.  There was a lot of that.  And they did make me keep my hands over my head the whole time (and Ms. Changes Pants While Driving?  SO loving you for the heads up on the pit shave before I left.  Really.  Excellent tip) There were also laser targets pointing right at my happy trail, which just made me mad on seven different levels, and a sticker over a small window on the very front of the machine that read, “Laser Lights.  Do NOT Look Here.”

Oh, those people have GOT to be kidding me.  There is no possible way I could have looked at anything else.  And if little mutant babies start growing in my eyeballs, I’m totally billing them for the eye-epidural someone is going to have to invent and administer to my eyeballs upon delivery.

And then it was over.  In four minutes, start to finish.  Now, I have certainly had dates that lasted less time than that, but I think I just expected more, you know?  Some sort of pomp, followed by the slightest bit of circumstance?  Nope, nothing.  I asked the tech if we could do it again 10 more times, so I could milk the silence for all it was worth, and she said no.  Meanie.  There were more patients to be seen and a waiting room full of people to save from my toddler who had just stopped howling about the time I stepped out of the tube of doom.

On a happy note, I did remember halfway through the CT Scan that I was awfully happy it wasn’t an MRI, because I just don’t think my IUD and those magnets would care much about all that flesh standing inbetween their love.  So at least I had that going for me.