Cook All Day, Work All Night

So, I was feeling a little overly-creative yesterday. There was a lot of throwing things together and seeing what happened in our kitchen all afternoon. Here for your viewing pleasure are "Something Blue" almond meringues with almond dust mixed in, miniature "Plain Old Chocolate" meringues and basic Vanilla. They were meant to be vanilla drizzled with butterscotch and sprinkled with graham cracker crumbs, but I ran out of time before I had to be at work.

The brownie/cupcakes you'll see are Dark Chocolate Coconut with toasted coconut and a Hershey's Kiss baked in. The Browned Butter Chocolate Buttercream I put together turned out too thick to thin, even with more milk. You know how I like to say "Waste not, want not?" Well, I took the frosting, broke it up and rolled it into balls, tossed it in powdered sugar and put it in the freezer. Yep, accidental FUDGE!!!!!! My parents will be thrilled.

I'm not really sure how I feel about this batch of vanilla. Paul bought a massive bag of organic sugar this week and it made the meringues look and taste a little different. I'm thinking that maybe the plain Kroger brand white sugar I've been using might be the best bet.

Too much sugar? Dinner was a bit of a throw together too. We still had two more servings of the Weight Watchers mac & cheese from last weekend. Sound good? Check it out here. 8 Weight Watchers points and 9 servings per pan. But I didn't know what to do with three tiny pork chop cutlets that have been hanging around since I made Pork Marsala for dinner Tuesday. So, here comes the weirdness...

Trim the fat from the chop with kitchen scissors. Sprinkle each side of the meat with a conservative amount of garlic salt. Place in a pan on medium-high with a touch of olive oil and brown both sides. Now, here we go. Add two soup spoon fulls of fresh apple butter to the pan about about one spoonful of tap water. Blend in the pan, roll the chops in the sauce and continue to heat on medium high for a couple of minutes. Give the mixture one good stir, cover and set to simmer for four or five minutes. But that didn't seem like enough. We had a ball of fresh mozzarella in the fridge. I cut a quarter inch thick slice of the cheese and laid one on top of each of the three pieces of pork. Serve all this with steamed zucchini to balance all the cheese. No joke. This was awesome.

Okay, now back to the sugar...

More like brownies than cupcakes. Mmmm. I took most of these to coworkers.

Wonder what else lives in our kitchen?

See? They can live together in harmony.

Organic Sugar Vanilla Meringues

I didn't realize at the time that this is Cookie Monster Blue. Awesome!

These were all half batches, so there won't be any waste, though there may be some extra waist. HA!

Almond and Chocolate, for Jess and Ash by request.

Sweetest thoughts, everyone. Have a great day!

Sara