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Turkey day is almost here and to celebrate we are headed to Arizona to spend the holiday with my sister, Christine.
Raised in the northeast, Arizona can be an interesting place to spend the holidays. Where else can you eat Thanksgiving dinner in shorts out on the back patio as neighbors don their cacti with Christmas lights? I challenge you to find a place.
However, one of the best parts of the holiday, besides spending it with loved ones, is the food. We are flying tomorrow, while my sister will be preparing a 12 pound bird just for the three of us. Can someone say leftovers? But the most important part of the meal won't be the bird, the gravy or the stuffing, but the highly anticipated cheesecake.
Having never tried cheesecake before, Matt was hooked after he tried my sister's Bailey's Chocolate Chip Cheesecake, last Thanksgiving. Back this year by personal request of her new brother-in-law, Christine sent me a picture, via camera phone, this morning. Matt simply replied,"AWESOME!" What that man won't do for desserts.
I'll be sure to post a nice picture when we slice it after dinner tomorrow. Feel free to email or post if you want the recipe. It's really good and very rich! Definitely a button-buster at the end of the big dinner. We'll just let Christine's 65 lb. dog, Mister, drag us around the block and that oughta burn off some calories.
One of my favorite guilty pleasures for a quick dinner is nuggets and tots. I am a huge fan of the potato and applaud its versatility. Since we do our best to eat healthy, this meal is reserved for those days when there is nothing else left in the house or we're just being plain lazy and don't want to invent something for dinner. (Or any day when I actually exercise, since I can rationalize that I "earned" the nuggets by "pre-burning" the calories.)
We usually go with extra easy (READ: lazy) frozen brands where we can toss both nugs and tots on the same cookie sheet and wait for the oven buzzer to sound. Imagine my delight this past Sunday, when we indulged in homemade all-white meat chicken strips, breaded and fried by Matt with no help from me at all. Matt is mostly the breakfast guy because he prefers cooking simple meals thereby dinner usually falls on me. We cook together or I cook alone, but very rarely has he cooked by himself without me eventually butting in and taking over. I was ordered to stay out of the kitchen. From my spot on the couch, I yelled in a few times to make sure everything was okay and even though there was some concerned banging at one point, I was proud of myself that I did not butt in once. (Maybe once. There was flour all over the counter! I was just helping.)
Dinner was great! Just the lazy, comfort food we needed, dialed up a notch. Matt found a recipe online and made his own breading with half breads crumbs and half crumbed 7-grain bread. Of course, he made us cut into every piece and inspect it's level of done-ness before eating, but since I'm here to tell the tale, obviously it turned out alright.
TheBellySpot.com is a web site that I created originally to share with family and friends as Matt and I planned our wedding for the spring of 2008. Since then it evolved into a great place to showcase our love of traveling and food. With a desire to expand it even further, I decided to join the food blogging community in the hope of finding to new ideas for the kitchen and new places to try when dining out.Why food? I have been a graphic designer for 10 years in the marketing industry and during that time I had a lot of food clients. I attended many food photography shoots and really admired the art of food styling. I developed a hobby of taking pictures of my own food, both at home and in restaurants. Recently, I left the full-time world and started my own freelance business in graphic design. I'm also entertaining the idea of becoming a food stylist and am taking classes here and there in NY to learn more.In the meantime, I'm enjoying experimenting with new ideas, new recipes and photography. Please pass on your comments, thoughts and suggestions. You can find our entire web site at www.thebellyspot.com.
Cheers!-Kathy
