I Do It for the Joy it Brings Because I am a Joyful Girl

Phew. What a week. It seems that gearing up for vacation almost makes it not worth it to go on vacation! But we persevere. Oh yes we do. Because we will soon be setting off for the sunnier shores of Las Vegas.

But before all that... there was the Superbowl. I am a Patriot's fan through and through, and the loss was a sad ending to an otherwise pretty darn good season, but good on for Manning Jr. He played a better game, and while it's the big game, there's always next year.

Enough about that. I made food, I took some crap pictures of some of it. And to start off, it's time to let you in on a little bit of my Oklahoma heritage. It's called queso. And it's good. But it's a particular type. Not gussied up, not fancified, not even mostly nature made food, but it's good. And for the Superbowl, it was a must.

It starts like this:



And it ends with a product so orange, no picture could be taken with my limited skills. So, no photo. But essentially you take the Rotel (which I brought back to Canada when I went home for Christmas) and the Velveeta (bought in Canada, hence the excellent a faire fondre!) and you melt them together. Now in a pork eating world, you would stir in some minced sausage. But as that type of eatin' isn't done in our home, we stuck with the cheez and rotel. Oh yeah. Some friends came over and were quite skeptical, but they tucked in and loved it.

I also made pigs in blankets with the help of Poppin' Fresh's 'Weiner Wraps', but no pics happened of those either because they were eaten up too quickly! For the cocktail sausage, I used kosher Baldwin Street beef cocktail sausages. Oh yeah. A little saucer of ketchup (from the US of A) and mustard, and we all ate little pigs until we could pop.

But we didn't pop! We moved on to the main course! I wanted to make something a little different than my standard chili, so I found a great recipe in the December/January 2007 issue of "Everyday with Rachel Ray" for Barbecue Beef Subs. It sounded perfect! And it was.


It's a dark photo, but that's just because the meat is a rich dark lovely goodness. And it was crazy easy to make. See for yourself! Anyway, we added a little bit of grated asiago cheese because, cheese makes it better, and ate up. I served the subs with my first ever attempt at creamy coleslaw. Ummm... yeah... creamy was far more present than cole or slaw.


Yeah.

But we ate it. And what we didn't eat, I am sad to say, was tossed in the bin. The beef subs, we saved the leftovers and will likely have them sometime this week. Yippie!