The Frank Funny Farm » Ladies and gentlemen I’m a cook.

4th of July Festivities

ben — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 19:54:54 +0000

Editor's note: Megan is gonna die of shock from my posting, but, whatever. she wanted me to post more, so i hope you guys don't mind seeing more food.

We had some friends over last night for a little 4th of July shindig; it turned out rather awesome. As with most of our friendly gatherings it was pot-luck style. I made Ground Venison Burgers with a Coffee Spice rub that were amazing. I also used a purple cabbage and some fresh cord we got from our CSA along with some hot peppers (including some cayenne from our garden!), carrots, lime, red wine vineagar and cilantro to make a spicy southwestern slaw. Keith and Laurie brought along an amazing whole grain mustard warm potato salad. Carey & Jared brought some hot dogs and brats. It was fantastic!

For dessert Megan made the most amazing trifle! Using some peaches from the CSA along with strawberries and blueberries she layyered the fruit with poud cake and an out of this world lemon curd. it was unbelievable.

Jared put on an amazing fireworks display in our back yard that was much more enjoyable than going downtown and standing in the rain amidst all the crazies – a great night indeed.

And as an added bonus, the leftovers for both breakfast this morning (trifle) and lunch today (potato salad) were awesome!

weekend: good food, good company, good music. eeeexcellent.

megan — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 15:50:16 +0000

we had much fun this weekend and we were even a bit productive. who knew? we also pretty much ate our way through the weekend, which was very much tasty. really, ben should be blogging about the foods because he, of course, took pictures of all of it, because that's what he does. friday night the ryan came over and we made greek lamb/beef burgers and sweet potato fries and snap beans. they was delicious. there was half a burger left, so saturday morning it went into omelets with spinach, mushrooms and feta. very much yum. saturday night was jared's birthday extravaganza which means gathering around a giant hibachi at mikado and watching our tasty dinner being made with flair and pyrotechnics, then going to (where else?) wilhagan's. sunday, in a stellar feat of wasting no foods, we grilled some chicken rubbed with the same gyro spices we used in the burgers, then used the rest of the tzatziki sauce we'd made as the sauce for pita pizzas with mushrooms and feta and parmesan and zuchinni and tomato for ben (and the chicken of course). the rest of the mint shall be taken care of tonight in some pesto-ish sauce for pasta. win!

after we had those scrumptious pizzas (brilliant idea i had there, i must say), we went downtown to war memorial auditorium to see ryan adams and the cardinals. the show was great, would've probably been awesomely fantastic had there been more vocals in the mix. alas. still, the band was super tight, i don't think i've heard them or any ryan adams band sound that good. i was kind of interested in how the show would be, because he's been clean for a while, but he also got married within the last few weeks, so he's (hopefully anyway) been happy and healthy and stuff, the combination of which i'm pretty sure is unprecedented. but, he is of course, still weird and goofy and geeky so it was great. at one point when the house lights were on, he noticed a guy standing up in the balcony was wearing the same shirt as neal casal, the guitarist and back-up singer. so he proceeded to improve a ridiculous song about it. hilarity. he also played a surprising mix of songs, all in the trademark faster rawkin' live version he tends to do. if you have heartbreaker, then you know the song "lucy." last night, he played a straight up punk version of it, which was clearly the way that song was meant to be done. glad he figured that out. he played for just about 3 hours, which was awesome, but also not, because it was sunday night and the show started at 8:30. very late going to bed for ben who had to get up at 6 this morning to go to the gym and me who should've gotten up at 7:20 to be at work at 8:30. don't tell anyone, but i didn't shower this morning. tiiiiiired. sleep and relaxation weren't completely on the agenda this weekend, though we did sleep in saturday a bit i suppose. it was a good spring break wrap-up weekend and hopefully a good "last weekend" for ben. they have a huge project at work, so apparently i won't see him until june. sad.

Frigid Fridays Or How I Learned To Stuffed A Deep Dish Pizza & Eat It All

ben — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 07:20:47 +0000

It's cold in Nashville. Before I move on, I don't wanna hear anything about "it's cold in Michigan, waaaaaah..." Bottom line is that it's 14ºF as I type this with the high temp for the last 24 hours being 19ºF and the low 4ºF. I know that's a little warmer than Nashville's record -17ºF low (which I remember), but I don't care who you are that is cold. So cold that instead of going out to have Mexican food with Dan we decided to just stay in, make sure we don't end up with dogcicles and make this awesome pizza wonderfulness.

A week or so ago Larry posted this link to a recipe for stuffed deep dish pizza and it sounded so good that I immediately told Megan that we had to have it soon. Megan got all the ingredients that I would need to make the pizza today and when I got home from work I got to prepping. Megan left to go get her hair trimmed and when she got back I was just slipping my wonderful creation into the oven. The filling that they used in the original recipe sounded alright but I wanted AWESOME. And let me tell you, AWESOMEness was achieved!

Instead of making dough from scratch Megan found whole wheat pizza dough at Trader Joe's which was awesome and a huge time saver. I started with that and filled it with fresh garlic, fresh broccoli, cremini mushrooms, artichoke hearts, sun-dried tomatoes, bacon, fresh spinach, pesto and three layers of mozzarella, shaved Parmesan and goat cheese. The top layer was covered in tomato basil marinara, and more mozzarella and Parmesan cheese.

We enjoyed this deliciousness while watching Ed Harris' Appaloosa. I enjoyed it quite a lot. First of all it's a Western, but the cinematography was really nice and the dialog was fantastic. Viggo Mortensen and Jeremy Irons, along with Harris, delivered fine performances that more than made up for Renée Zellweger's inclusion in the film. All around a good night with my Meggo. But, seriously, the pizza was AWESOME. Just take a look:

For breakfast tomorrow morning I plan on making blueberry chocolate pancakes. Hopefully that will happen because Ive wanted to for a while.