Nailed It! - Volume 1 (which does not guarantee a Volume 2, just so we're clear)

All of a sudden I've gotten all hardcore about making the recipes I find on Pinterest, and by hardcore, I mean a few this week. (Hey, for me, an attention span that long is...oh, fuck, my coffee!)

Sorry. Back. What was I saying?

So, a little more than a week ago I made Garlic-Cheddar Oven Fried Chicken. This recipe is not for the garlic-ambivalent. It was very bold-flavored and Kyle and I loved it. I could see how the overpowering garlic would not appeal to some. It would work very well with much less garlic (but WHY WOULD YOU WHY). No, really, to each his own (freakshow). Here's mine, I didn't think about taking the picture til I was a good way through it...and it was so good I didn't want to stop.  

Well, after that was the Honey-glazed pork chops, but they were unimpressive looking so I didn't take a picture (I forgot). Plus, I'm so poor that I seriously stole like 15 honey packets from Starbucks to make it. (They give em away! I have no guilt! Kiss my ass!) So, we will just pass over those and say "try em, they're good."
Then came yesterday. I don't know what motivation fairy blew dust up my funhole yesterday, but I sure wish it would move me in the direction of like...running or jumping jacks instead of cooking fattening things I find on the internet. I guess you have to take what fairy-prodding you get.
So yesterday morning I woke up at 5. A.M. Yeah. I lay in bed, in total denial, willing my bladder to STFU and my mind to decide to go back to the dream about the bus I was in flying off the bridge (anything is better than 5 A.M.)...but to no avail. At 6 A.M. (always in CAPS) I got out of bed and went downstairs to begin construction on a Martha Stewart recipe I have seen all over Pinterest - the Bacon, Egg, & Toast Cups.
They look pretty fucking clever, right? It is Martha Stewart after all (she's not a demon...she's a witch).
So - a couple of takeaways if you decide to make these. They are not all that difficult - but she's serious about the bread covering the whole muffin cup. Once I cut and placed the bread, most of them left a little space at the top. The egg then overflowed the bread a little, and there was no bread for me to butter up there! It also made getting them out a little more difficult. Well, I am sure that Martha would disagree, but for me - I think that if I make them again I will just use the whole piece of bread, slightly rolled out (like she says) and then molded better to the inside of the cup. Then, add the bacon and the egg - and trim any of the bread if needed.
Also, I am at high altitude, so I need to learn my damn lesson and start checking things way earlier when they are baking, or just adjust the temperature down by at least ten degrees to start. Mine were a bit overcooked. They were still good, the eggs were just hardcooked instead of "just set" as Ms. Stewart suggests. Here are mine:

My next adventure of the day was the making of the spaghetti sauce! I may have made sauce once before (I seem to recall talking to my mother about it a long time ago, but I don't remember the actual cooking, so this may as well been my virgin encounter. It felt like the first time, baby. I don't have sauce-making pictures, either - not because I made a sad mess of it or anything, but because I was focused on not fucking up and having to waste all those ingredients. (Okay, it's only about $8 worth of ingredients, but when you're unemployed, it's important. Plus, I'm accommodating 4-5 dinners here - that's significant!)
Anywho....I used this recipe - somewhat altered. I did not add the meat or the onions. I wanted meatless sauce (I can always cook and add meat later for a meal) and Kyle is still maintaining that he dislikes onions (I think that next time I will add onion powder for the taste. He only complains of onions when there are actual onions involved.)
Well, the sauce turned out rather yummy - I tweaked the seasonings a bit - the removal of the onions tends to leave a gap in the flavor where you're going "this is missing....something...what is it??" Well, I decided that garlic is, in fact, the universal marinara sauce solvent - and about doubled the amount called for in the recipe. Worked out well.
On to the next project (and this one really is a "project" - and should possibly even be made ahead of time in the future) - Pepperoni Monkey Bread. Now, I have never made regular monkey bread, so I basically was just picking a recipe cause it looked cool.
I also did not get a picture of the final product - Kyle was all over that thing so fast! Here is my assembly-line photo:

I admit, even though it also came out overcooked (you would think I would learn but noooooo), it was pretty tasty. It also had the benefit of my kick-ass marinara for dipping, so it all turned out in the end.
So - it was darker on the inside of the pan than it was on the outside.
I was feeling lazy (hey, this thing takes a long time to assemble, cut me some slack!) so I used Pillsbury pizza dough, which might have been part of the problem, but, overall I still think that cooking for longer at a lower temp would be the way to go here. Also, it didn't stick together as well as the one in the picture, so I think I need to press the bites a bit more when placing in the pan, so they adhere to each other more.
So. That's my Pinterest recipe week - the place is just such a good resource for recipes you would never have found anywhere else!
Like this Green Smoothie recipe I made today. It tastes like that Odwalla Superfood juice - so yeah, it looks funny but tastes so good. I didn't get the same neon-green that she got, but it still worked out well:

Mmmmm delicious and so good for you! 

I just wrote a whole post about cooking.
I think that's in the book of Revelations, somewhere. Be prepared.
Peace out, homies.