Daily Chatter: 6/5/13

Today we met up with some friends and one mentioned that she was headed to Sprouts since it was Wednesday and oats were on sale.  Oh yeah – thank you for reminding me!  You would think that I would have remembered that myself since I, um, just posted about it yesterday… So after the kids were done playing, we headed to Sprouts.  Oh a whim.  Without a list.  On a Wednesday.  With five kids.  An incredibly stupid idea, but we made it out of there unscathed – though I can’t say that for other customers or product displays.  I met a blog reader and ran into an old friend that’s back for the summer, though, so that was fun!

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I was thinking of trying America’s Test Kitchen’s homemade frozen pizza.  I did – I actually made a double batch – and it was quite good!  However, I will say that I really thought heating the oven up to 500º, preheating the pizza stone, brushing the crust with oil, and whatnot was a little overkill for something that I wanted to be able to throw in the oven like you can with the ones you buy at the store.  I am all about doing all of that if I make pizza fresh, but it was a little too crunchy that way anyway, not to mention the extra work.

So when I cooked the second batch, I heated the oven to 425º and put the pizza directly on a cookie sheet, baking it for around 25 minutes.  We all enjoyed it much more, and that was truly “real frozen pizza easy”.  I’m planning on making them again!   The only part I don’t like is that there’s not a great way to wrap them – I ended up freezing them on a piece of parchment paper directly on a cookie sheet, and then wrapping them well in aluminum foil once they were frozen. It used a lot of aluminum foil, but since it didn’t even touch the food until after it was already frozen, it was basically clean when I took it off so of course I saved it to use again.

Which brings me to something else: how many of you save aluminum foil or plastic bags?  I usually save the foil, unless it is dirty – but if it’s just used to cover a pan and never touches food, why not?  Plastic bags, I only save if they had “dry” food in them and are easy to wipe out.  I’ve heard people say that they feel like their grandma when they do that, which shocked me – I guess I thought everyone did.  Do you?

So you probably know that Jeremy and I don’t watch much TV, but there are a couple of things we do watch: college football and some basketball, political event coverage, a movie here or there, Perry Mason, and Food Network Star.  We don’t even have a TV easily accessible (It used to be in our closet, but it got moved somewhere when we were packing up stuff to move and I can’t even remember where it is.  I think it’s in the basement?) but you can watch Food Network Star on Food Network’s website so last night we watched the first episode of the new season.

I told Jeremy they have the same cast of characters as last time: vintage girl, supermodel, girl with accent that’s hard to understand, rocker dude, incredible chef that is boring, southern girl, etc.  Of course, he pointed out that there really can’t be that many different types of people that would want to be on a reality show such as Food Network Star…

At this point my pic to win is the semi-vegetarian girl because she seems like a natural on the camera, but vintage girl was good, too.  There are a few ahem that I would like to leave ASAP, but Jeremy is convinced that they will keep the drama queens on for awhile (remember Penny from last season?) because you want them to be kicked out so bad that you keep watching every week to see if they finally get kicked out.

I’m glad the team format from last season did not come back again, though I was bummed that Giada, Bobby, and Alton didn’t pick their own contestants this time.  (Clearly Alton Brown’s talent scouting abilities creamed the other two last time, so I’m not surprised.) OK, someone comment and tell me we are not the only ones who watch Food Network Star!