Battle of Ingredients #14 BBQ in the Thunderstorm

The summer is officially here and the weather has been beautiful with a heat wave of sort, more like humidity that swept through this past week as the thunderstorm just refused to roll in. Of course, Phoebe and I ended up choosing the day for the Battle of Ingredients on the day that the thunderstorm did hit. The thunderstorm did give us the perk of having a nice cool breeze. The husband was a champ and toughed out the rain under our car port to be the grill master. Summer BBQ is always a theme with us and we did try to keep things a little different and give some variety.

Drinks

As a change in pace, especially since I also found out that I had overtime on Sunday, my friends brought in the lighter coolers for our drinks and chose a mix pack for Smirnoff Ice which had the Classic, Wild Berry, Raspberry and Orange. These ones are always light and fun. Its been a while since I’ve had a Smirnoff Ice so it definitely brings me back to the early days when I first got introduced to the whole drinking alcohol business. Back to this choice, it was really refreshing and fruity and suitable for the general shindig.

BBQ Food

Phoebe

Mushrooms, Corn & Zucchini

Coca Cola Marinated Chicken Drumsticks

Phoebe bought over some mushrooms (mini bella & fresh shiitake) along with zucchini and corn to grill as our veggies. At the same time, she did a take 2 on last year’s coca cola chicken wings except this time she used drumsticks and had marinated them for 2 days beforehand to hopefully get the coca cola flavor more prominent. While the drumsticks still didn’t have the cola taste being exceptionally standout, it still had a really nice flavor to it.

Kim

Chicken and Veggie Skewers

Bacon-wrapped Sausages

My contribution went to two very basic options. The first was the bacon-wrapped sausages which I had planned for last time but didn’t end up doing so here we go. It turned out as it would to be quite good since you can’t really go wrong with sausages and bacon combo (at least to me). Chicken and Veggies skewers composed of chicken thighs, zucchini, bell peppers and Spanish onion. We also decided to try a new barbecue sauce and bought the Joe Beef one. They turned out really good as well.

Dessert

Nothing for dessert tonight and we chose the healthy route of having fruits which I obviously forgot to take a picture of. Next time, I’ll have some other plans.

That’s it for this Battle of Ingredients!
July is a busy month (as explained in the last Weekly Adventures post HERE), so we are working out some place to dine out instead.
Battle of Ingredients should resume in August (we are working out availability…). 

Breakfast Recipe: Bacon and Egg Hash

We love breakfast food. I don’t think I can explain how much we actually love it. Its probably why you see breakfast food recipes where we just eat it for dinner as well. Breakfast style dinners are just fantastic. Anyways, with that said, I wanted to try something different for my husband’s birthday brunch since we’re quite traditionalists so we go with the separate bowls of bacon, sausages, scrambled eggs and potatoes. However, I’d had breakfast casseroles and skillets and hashes and have loved it a lot so I went hunting on Pinterest for one that I liked which was relatively simple to make.

Then I came across this recipe: https://cafedelites.com/cheesy-bacon-and-egg-hash/

And of course, its me so I modified the portions and some little bits here and there and came out with this:

Bacon and Egg Hash

Ingredients

3 medium potatoes, scrubbed clean and peeled
2 tbsp olive oil
Bacon (I used about 4-5 strips)
4 cloves of garlic, minced/finely chopped
2 large eggs
Pepper to season

How to make it

1. Dice potatoes in 3/4 inch cubes.
2. Preheat oven to 400F.
3. Arrange the potatoes in a single layer in a skillet pan or an oven pan. Spray with a light coating of cooking oil spray.
4. Bake for 25 minutes. Mixing them once halfway through cooking time.
5. Remove from the oven, add the bacon and put back into the oven for another 15 minutes.
6. Remove from the oven and make two wells in the hash, crack the egg into each well and sprinkle the garlic around the eggs and over the potatoes.
7. Put it back into the oven for another 10 minutes or until the eggs have been cooked to your preference.
8. Remove from oven. Season with some pepper if desire and serve immediately

This is definitely  more than an inspiration. I honestly needed a recipe that would tell me the temperature to bake it in and yet again, I worked with what I had. We ran out of green scallions so I used garlic. I actually used a little too much but we love garlic here so its not a big deal for us. This is for a 2 person portion since we exactly had 3 potatoes left. Either way, this breakfast hash turned out pretty good. We also did remove the cheese but thats because we never do cheese on dishes since I’m lactose intolerant. My husband ended up sprinkling some shredded cheese on there afterwards to taste.

These meals are fairly straight forward and you can technically put anything you’d like that cooks fairly quickly. The efficiency of breakfast food is one of the reasons we like to make it on a lazy Sunday morning (evening). It was pretty tasty since it didn’t even need salt with the bacon already having the salt to season everything around it. It turned out pretty good. The potatoes weren’t as crispy as I had wanted but if you use a wider pan or skillet (which I couldn’t find), it will do the job. The single layer potatoes are the key here for having it crispier.

I have improvements I’ll work on for next time but overall, this breakfast hash turned out pretty good. 🙂

Cabane à Sucre: Érabliere au Palais Sucré (Mont Saint Gregoire, Quebec)

After a few years ago’s little sugar shack incident that left quite the sour taste in our mouth, which you can find here, my girl friends and I decided to head out to give it another try but of course, at another location. With that experience in our pockets, we made sure to get how everything worked here before even beginning the meal. I’m getting ahead of myself already.

Let’s get ready to sugar off! 🙂

Érabliere au Palais Sucré

The site itself was really nice. There were some farm animals to look at. There were also swing sets around a little fire and a playground area for the kids. Inside a house was a the tir a sirop which is a little maple syrup thing that I’ll show you later. We had a bit of time to walk around while we waited for our table to be available since we got there a little earlier than the reservation. It was a beautiful day so made the walk very enjoyable.

Now for the meal!

 

Pea Soup

Main meal

In the main meal, there’s the scrambled eggs, bacon, ham, sausages, fried potatoes and cooked potatoes, coleslaw, beans, and the crunchy thing. Most of these have maple syrup already but you can always add more maple syrup since that is the point.

Dessert

All the desserts had milk so I couldn’t have any of it but my friends said that it was incredibly sweet so it was very filling as well. There’s some sugar pie and mini pancakes and little cakes and the pudding.

Finally, after we left, it was time to use the ticket for the “tir au sirop” which is maple syrup on ice and you use a popsicle stick to roll it up to eat.

This is actually one of my favorite winter highlights and I love it a lot. Its pretty awesome. And this tasted really good. It is pure maple syrup so every place has a little variety and I like this place’s quite a bit.

A quick little outing but its always fun with my girl friends. It was a ton of fun and the meal was pretty good. Most of all, the service was very good. Our waitress tried her best to even offer options for the dessert when she knew that I couldn’t have any. I always appreciate these little gestures.

A fun little outing!
Have you been to Sugar Shack (aka Cabane a Sucre)?

Bacon Avocado Fries!

This past weekend’s experiment goes to having the mission of using up my four rapidly ripening avocados that I bought the weekend before.

A part of it went to making the Avocado basil pasta that me and my boyfriend love a lot. I talked about it HERE when I first made it for last year’s Thanksgiving.

Then the rest went to making two batches of Bacon Avocado Fries over Friday and Saturday. 🙂 These things are addictive!

 

I found this awesome recipe on Pinterest and you can find it right HERE at The Examiner!

The recipe is relatively straight forward. However, there are a few differences.

• Its supposed to make 20 but I only could get about 16-18.
• I didn’t cook the bacon in advance and just baked the whole thing for 5-8 minutes more in the oven

The original plan was to try making the breaded avocado fries but bacon seemed like a nice time to eat something so not good but so delicious in celebration for the end of an extremely long week.

This was delicious.  The combination was really nice because the bacon was crispy and when you bit into it the avocado would just melt. I love those sorts of texture.  Just makes it feel so awesome and tasty! You just can’t go wrong with bacon 🙂

A short little recipe and very simple to make! Love it! I’m definitely going to be making this one again eventually!

Do you like avocado? Any neat recipes that you like? Any recipes you like to add bacon to?

Bacon and Egg Cups!

Happy Monday, my lovelies! I’m in a great mood and figured that I would share some food posts to brighten up everyone’s day!

Last night was my boyfriend and me’s (not so sudden) desire to have our breakfast style dinner.  I was checking out my pins on Pinterest earlier in the day also to look for a baking recipe, which I will finally do tonight hopefully 🙂

Back to my dinner, as we were preparing, I landed on this very delicious looking recipe for Bacon and Eggs.  You can see it here: http://www.pinterest.com/pin/313844667755043073/

Somehow, the actual link for the recipe doesn’t work anymore but here’s how mine turned out!

Bacon and Egg Cups

Its super easy to make this.

What you do is that you take muffin tins and then you could add some non-stick spray if you’d like.  I didn’t, but it might help to take it out easier afterwards. You wrap a strip of bacon to each contour of the muffin tins and then whip up some eggs, as many as you would need to fill up each one 3/4 full. For me, it took about 5-6 eggs for each pan. They also suggest to mix in some cheese as well.  I can’t eat cheese so I didn’t do that. After that, you set your oven for 350F and pop it in there for 30 mins or so.

And VOILA!

Bacon and Egg Cups

These tasted really good.  My only problem was the border of bacon strip sometimes would go out of shape as I was preparing the eggs to pour in it.  The eggs were not seasoned for mine but I never feel the need to when there is bacon because it tends to be salty already.  However, if I were to do this again, maybe I’d try out add hints of smoked paprika perhaps.  Might give it a boost in taste.  It could be interesting 🙂

This is simple and quick and if you don’t like breakfast style dinners, well, you can just make it for breakfast or brunch, whichever works for you!

Do you like bacon and eggs? What is a must-have for breakfast or brunch meals?