Super Bowls & Spinach Artichokes Dip

Posted on February 17, 2011 by Egg Beater

Sunday, Febuary 6th, 2011.

Mark that date in the history books. A day that will go down in infamy. KFun, is that even a word??? Pretty sure its underlined in red here… juuuust sayin’. (Stop reigning on my parade Lay.)

(In case you didn't just notice, we figured out how to change the font color on our posts. So that means we each get what we say in different colors! Pretty snazzy, huh?)

No. Sunday, Feb. 6th was not the day that those Cheese Heads up north partied ruthlessly in celebration of their football team’s tiny little win.

But it was the day that we had our very FIRST success in the kitchen. Oh yes – I said SUCCESS!! Let me back up. We decided on the glorious national holiday known as Super Bowl Sunday, where Americans ruled by some unspoken cultural norm, eat themselves stupid, that we also would attempt to throw out a fan-freakin-tastic meal out to all our friends so they too could eat themselves into the uncomfortable food coma that is absolutely certain to happen to 95% of our population. (How was THAT for a fun run-on sentence? But seriously, let’s be honest – our friends had their doubts on our skills and were smart to bring in the reinforcements from their own kitchens!)

We found Super Bowl recipes on Realsimple.com, and after sorting through caramelized onion dips (caramel & onions? No thank you…) and fish dips (really? This was the day of the Cheese Heads. We needed CHEESY not fishy!)….for Super Bowl mania we chose to tackle the art of SPINACH AND ARTICHOKE DIP. This is no joke! I had to scroll through at least 3 various types of spinach dip so that KFun could approve the amount of cheesiness. This is a girl who when given 10,000 amazing options at the wonderful world of Taco Bell chooses to get just cheese in a tortilla? Really!??! She means biz with the cheese! (Those little Taco Bell cheese roll-ups are dabomb.com by the way…anyway, back to the story….)

Hold on to your pants because there is MORE than just the Spinach & Artichoke Dip………… SOUTHWESTERN CHILI! Did we just knock your socks off? Because I think we just did.

Since we had nothing but all day long to master the art of kitchening, we figured that we would try not one, but TWO recipes. (I know, I know… such overachievers.)

(We've decided to save you time, energy, and some pity on us, so we are going to save the chili for another post coming soon! Stay tuned....)

So our day started out at the grocery. And with our trusty grocery list written on the back of a receipt found in my purse off we ventured to……WALMART………..Brace yourself! Here are the ingredients we had to pick up.

Ingredients – Spinach & Artichoke Dip

  • 1 10-ounce box frozen cut or chopped spinach, thawed
  • 1 12-ounce jar artichoke hearts, drained and roughly chopped (BTW – there is no “HOW-TO” video on the art of ”roughly chopping” an artichoke heart… so I literally tried to ever so carelessly “roughly” throw my knife around the air while trying to chop it.. one word… danger.)
  • 1/2 cup whipped cream cheese
  • 3/4 cup sour cream
  • 1 cup grated Cheddar
  • 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt… tricky salt again…..searching glossary for kosher
  • 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
  • pita chips, tortilla chips, or sliced French bread
  • 1 lemon, cut into wedges (optional) – never heard of lemon in spinach dip but whatever let’s go with it


    • Finding the right spinach was a tad tricky and don’t get me started on the salt aisle. (I mean it is really quite ridiculous… ice cream salt? Really?!?!? Come on people!) We also had to double the recipe since the amount of ingredients only served 4 and we, my friends, were serving a whopping 8, which let me tell you was a bit tricky. Because math sucks.

    Starting to regret never paying attention being taught how many cups are in a quart and all that jazz. So with Lil MKFun (KFun’s super awesome adorable mini-me daughter) in tow we head off to dominate in the kitchen!!!!

    Directions – Spinach Artichoke Dip

  • Heat oven to 400° F.
  • Squeeze the spinach between paper towels to remove excess moisture. In a medium bowl, combine the spinach, artichokes, cream cheese, sour cream, and Cheddar. Season with the salt and pepper. Yeeeaaahhhh….so I guess leaving spinach frozen isn’t the way to “remove excess moisture” huh? Yeah, I didn’t even know spinach had ‘moisture’…um, gross… After approximately 76 attempts at thawing in the microwave and squishing between paper towels, we got the “family pack” of spinach dried a bit. (Well, sort of dried. Okay. Not dried at all.)
  • Scrape the mixture into a small oven-safe baking dish. Bake until lightly golden and heated through, about 15 minutes. Serve warm with the chips or bread and the lemon wedges, if desired.

    •  

    So let me just say this recipe was pretty much a breeze! The only teeensy tricky part was that we don’t know how to add, subtract, multiply when it comes to most everything cups, quarts, ounces and all that foreign shenanigans. So proportions were a tad bit of a cluster challenging……but I mean, what can we say? We can’t be perfect alllllll the time, right? We like to think of ourselves like Emeril. We just take a handful of an ingredient and BAM, throw that stuff in there and somehow it magically knows what to do when it gets in the pot! :)

    So let me jump to the part where we served this fantastic appetizer. When we walked in to the party house, it was like a scene out of a movie. You could almost hear the music from a scary movie faintly in the background. With dishes of food in our hands, the wary eyes of our friends shift nervously around the room, silently wondering if the world was about to come to an end who would be the first to offer up their own death by way of “Burnt Toast” cooking taste them. After forcing it down their throats little hesitation, our friends started to taste….and…..

    THEY LOVED IT!!

    (Okay, LOVE both bolded and all capital letters might be a bit of an exaggeration, but whatever…it’s our blog and we’ll exaggerate how we want.) But really – the feedback was that it wasn’t bad at all! (Except that it may have been a tad too spinachy. Maybe we shouldn’t have gone with the family pack. Doh!) Whatever, it was ONE person who commented on the spinach but it didn’t matter what he said because after all, it was the healthiest part and we can just say we planned it that way! :-) So can I get a WHOOP WHOOP?!?!?  WHOOP WHOOP!

    Stay tuned for our MAIN COURSE! :-) Coming soon….

    Posted in Appetizers | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

    Rice and Stuff

    Posted on February 5, 2011 by Egg Beater

    So tonight my husband decided he wanted some sort of weird rice and tomato concoction thing he invented in the kitchen.

    It’s basically a delicious assortment of cherry tomatoes (which by the way....why are they called CHERRY tomatoes?? Cherries and tomatoes taste NOTHING like each other. Dumb.), rice, soy sauce and a hodge-podge of other crap he feels like throwing in at the moment.

    Here’s what I think the recipe says in his brain.

    1) Make Rice.  2) Throw tomatoes and other random stuff in a bowl.  3) Dump a ton of soy sauce in.  4) Put soy/tomato concoqtion on top of rice. 5) Enjoy.

    So anyway, turns out we didn’t have any tomatoes in the house so he decided to run out to the store to buy them. And what were his last words to me as he hustled out the door in a tomato-crazed-frenzy?

    “Start the rice. And don’t mess up.”

    Great.

    (insert long awkward pause of disbelief and then childlike groaning and complaining).

    So without a rice recipe I was left to fend for myself.

    Somehow, in the back of my mind, I had some sort of schemata that said boiling water was needed.  So I got out a pot to prepare for the boiling.

    I then found a bag of rice in our pantry.  And guess what??? On the back of it….there were DIRECTIONS!  YES!

    The directions said to put a cup of rice and a cup of water in the pot and bring to a boil.  Then cover and lower heat to some temperature that I can’t remember.  Sweetness.  This I could do.  I grabbed a glass out of our cupboard and filled it with rice and dumped into the pot.  Then filled it with water and dumped it in.  Turn on heat and let Mr. Kenmore Stovetop to the rest.  (Oh wait....it meant a "cup" as in a measuring cup?? Oops. Oh well. It looked okay.)

    Once it was boiling, I oh-so-cleverly followed the instructions and covered the pot and lowered the heat.  Done.  What a bad ass rice-cooker I am, right?

    Wrong.

    I walked back into the kitchen to find this nastiness boiling over.

    Oh yes.  That gooey mess made my circa 1930′s stovetop even grosser than it already was.  My question is, “Is this NORMAL??”  Does everyone’s pot of rice boil over and gross them out too? 

    Whatever, I ignored it and went back to watching TV.

    A few minutes later, the husband got back and found a pot of newly cooked rice!  BOOYAH!  This is what magic looks like:

    From there, I let the husby take over and create our delicious meal of rice and tomato-soy stuff. 

    Success!

    Posted in Main Dishes | 2 Comments

    Snickering at Snickerdoodles

    Posted on January 30, 2011 by Egg Beater

    Preparing for the holidays, Lacey & I decided to get into the spirit of things and take a snicker in the kitchen at the Snickerdoodle bars so generously offered by BettyCrocker.com.

    Note: This was NOT attempted without adult supervision. (i.e. Our husbands/boyfriends). Kids, please do not try this at home.

    Here are the steps to making this delightful dessert straight from the recipe. Follow along closely to learn what NOT to do when baking.

    Step 1

  • Heat oven to 350° F. Spray or grease bottom only of a 13x9-inch baking pan with cooking spray. In small bowl, combine flour, baking powder, and salt; set aside.

    • First of all, go ahead and grab yourself a glass of wine.  Or two or three.  You’ll need it. 

    Secondly, pre-heating an oven in a strange kitchen is not as easy as it sounds.  My compadre happened to desert me all alone on the battlefield with a strange Kenmore applianced enemy walk out of the room at the moment of pre-heating.  With an oven like mine (think circa 1915 oven and the reason we decided to cook at Lay’s!), I was un-equipped with the schemata to work the new high-tech stoves/oven/contraption that can bake, self-clean, change your kids diaper and pay the bills all at the same time.  (Insert Lay’s boyfriend to save the day on pre-heating the oven!)

    It must be noted that when we read this step what we really read was: “Blah blah blah blah…pre-heat oven….blah blah blah blah…” So, once the oven was pre-heated, we skipped on to step 2. 

    Step 2

  • In large bowl, beat butter with electric mixer on high speed until creamy. Beat in sugars. Gradually beat in eggs and vanilla into sugar mixture until combined. On low speed, beat in dry ingredients until combined.

    • Um…..beat the butter, huh? Electric mixer, huh? Be right back while I figure out what the hell that means and if I have an electric mixer….um NO I don’t have that. I can’t even make toast, so you think I have an electric mixer? Mmmm, no…. must improvise. Who has got a big spoon and large muscles?  “KFUN! GET YO butt over here with those guns!” Beating of the eggs then began (arrrms sooo tirrred…but the beating must go on!!!!) Beating is also good for toning arms, btw….

    Oh yeah.  And small packets of butter work just as well as any ‘ole stick of butter you can get at the store.  Thank you Cracker Barrell! 

    Step 3

  • Spoon half the batter into pan; spread evenly. Sprinkle cinnamon-sugar mixture evenly over batter.

    • Have you ever tried to batter a pan with your finger?????!!!!!  Let’s just say this crap doesn’t spread very evenly. So we had to use our fingers a spoon AND a spatula to scrape it off. Totally sanitary. No worries.

    Step 4

  • Dollop teaspoon size amounts of remaining batter evenly over cinnamon-sugar mixture.

    • After referring to our “Kitchenisms” page, we learned what ‘dollop’ meant and so we torpedo blasted spoonfuls of gooey nastiness yummy batter on top of what we had already created. Let’s just say it did not have that delicate swirl look Betty C was talkin about on the cover of the box. It kind of resembled a 17 mth old’s…. wellll….. turd on a bad day, to put it nicely.

    Step 5

  • Bake 20 to 25 minutes or until golden brown and toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool completely, about 1 hour.

    • Baking 20-25 minutes is only optional. If you are sitting in front of the oven watching the entire baking process, you should be able to tell when it’s done. When you’re feeling the urge, take it out and taste.

    Test with a toothpick.  Hmmm, ok… no toothpicks?  No worries.  We managed to find a 12in kabob stick and stuck it in there.  Now the whole test with a toothpick thing…what are we actually looking for when we pull it out? No idea, but we stuck it in and pulled it out and took a look and had no idea what the hell we were looking for and said, “eh give it 5 more…..”

    Step 6

  • In small bowl, stir glaze ingredients until smooth and thin enough to drizzle. Drizzle over bars. For bars, cut into 6 rows by 4 rows.

    • Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeah…………. so we may have overlooked this step in our burnt toast way of reading a recipe.  It must have been mixed in with those “blah blah blah’s.”  Insert moment of panic rationalization.  What can we come up with to make our own yumminess glaze out of??  Hmm, nevermind let’s not be overachievers here…maybe no one will notice?

    Eww....what iiissssss that??

    We ended up taking our concoction to work to set out in our break room to see who would dare eat it. Turns out nobody. Who’da thunk it? But someone washed the container for us. How sweet.

    I don't blame whoever threw it out!

    If you’re interested in learning the correct way to cook these , go here:
    Betty Crocker Snickerdoodle Bars

    Posted in Desserts...Yum, Yum! | Tagged | Leave a comment

    Sugahhhhh Cookies!

    Posted on January 15, 2011 by Egg Beater

    Don’t these sugar cookies look yummy on the cover of the box?

    We thought so too.

    Until we made them. 

    First of all, I’m not sure where the hell the icing from the package cover comes from.  That sure as heck was NOT included in the 20 minute all-inclusive process.  Therefore, our cookies were lacking the delicious goodness that is pure sugar coating.

    False advertising is what I call that.  Epic fail Betty C. 

    Anyway, we decided to set out and bake these cookies and give ourselves a shot at being domestic divas.

    So I will be completely honest in letting you know that we followed the directions on the back of the box to a T.  (Whatever “to a T” means….it’s all relative, right?)

    So we followed said directions, painfully mixed dry batter with different arm workout techniques, and flopped the dough on a pan that Lacey’s boyfriend so nicely placed out for us.  Since KFun’s little toddler was running around the house like a banchie being uber sweet and calm, we decided to make her mini-sugar cookies to escalate whatever sugar high she was already on for pure parental comedic value reward her for being such a sweetie.

    Well, once again….fail.  Our first failure in the kitchen together.  And therefore our first cooking blog post = fail.  Bummer. 

    Posted in Desserts...Yum, Yum! | Tagged , | 9 Comments

    Welcome to Burnt Toast!

    Posted on November 7, 2010 by Egg Beater

    We’re busy screwing something up in the kitchen right now….we’ll be back soon with stories of our cooking shenanigans!

    Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments