I’m confident you remember that in April of 2023, I conducted a Spam (Hormel) vs. Treet (Armour) taste test and my conclusion was that they were both way too salty. Three months later Big Daddy Dave did a post about Spam Lite which contains 25% less salt so I bought a can of it to try.
It’s hard to believe that my first blog post was 15 years ago today and my first total post said “Well, I'm new to this blogging thing and this is my first - mostly to just see if I can do it. My next goal will be to learn to post pictures, then I'll worry about making the blog look cool.”
Most of the folks who have been my blogger buddies through
the years are no longer posting and I really appreciate those of you who still do
stop by and I love to hear from you via your comments. I’ve considered quitting a few
times until I realize how much I use my blog to research our lives and recipes
during those years so I guess I’ll continue until I run out of things to post
about.
Bev discovered four chicken thighs in the fridge that needed to be cooked and when I went on line looking for recipes, I came across a Pioneer Woman site titled 60 Best Chicken Thigh Recipes for an Easy Weeknight Meal - it's a compilation of recipes from other folks. After looking at all of them with the criteria of not making a trip to the store, I settled on the recipe for One Pan Spanish Chicken and Rice which came from the “Crème De La Crumb” blog. I generally followed the recipe but only made ¾ of the spice mix and and I used skin on thighs and Bev decided it needed some peas and carrots.
I’d been wanting to cook beer-can chicken for a while and we wanted Eliza to bring her family down so we married the two desires. I like the idea of adding butter and seasoning under the chicken skin so I looked around the web at several recipes and selected the herb butter recipe from food.com and tripled it to get the recipe below. This was my first time making compound butter.
We had tomatoes that needed to be used and Bev wanted to turn them into a tomato pie and use the recipe from The Pioneer Woman. Bev made three changes to the filling recipe by omitting the blue cheese (we had none), adding parmesan, and substituting basil for dill and she used refrigerated pie dough from the store.
We recently had a long-weekend visit from grandkids, Reese and Riley Walker, and three of their friends and Bev likes to make dishes that she knows they really like such as chicken and dumplings for college girl Riley. The dish had a great flavor but the chicken stuck to the pan bottom while the dumplings were cooking and since she had enough broth and chicken for another batch, we decided on a different cooking method for round two.
It’s Sockeye Salmon season in Alaska and once again our local Food City had them on sale for $9.99/lb. so we stocked up for the freezer and kept one out to eat along with another variety that we had in the freezer. I cooked them along with some asparagus for a side dish. The sockeye is the much redder filet and was never frozen.
My dear wife, who requires more sauce on her pasta than anyone I’ve ever seen, really surprised me by requesting pasta with fresh tomatoes and basil which is nearly sauceless. So, I whipped up a batch of Pasta al Pomodoro Crudo using the recipe below which I altered for the amount of pasta that I was cooking.
