Awful Blogger 101 and Croque Monsieur

I’m terrible at this. Maybe because I just started it? It’s been 10 days since I last updated and I’ll tell you what I’ve been doing almost the entire time.

BONES!

Yes. Bones. I am utterly and shamelessly addicted to David Boreanaz and his delicious banter about crime scenes. Addicted. I cannot stop watching it. Thankfully I’m almost finished with the 5th season otherwise I would literally get nothing done.

In between, of course, I have been cooking things! I’ve made about a handful of tasty treats that I want to post all in this one entry but I figure that would be an overload so I’ll just pick one….maybe two…but I should save some for entries later on so I keep updating regularly, right? 😉

My birthday dinner was also absolutely wonderful! P.F. Changs is my favorite place to eat on my birthday! We loaded up on everything and even got two desserts 😉

The other dessert was cheesecake. Yum!

As for non food things, remember that digital photography class I was oh-so-excited to take? Well, in living my life by the “there are no coincidences” theory, I dropped the class.

Reason being?

1. I ordered the wrong book.
2. The book would not arrive til after the first class and the teacher was adamant we have it the first day.
3. The tab I needed to access online to see where/when my class was, was down the night before.
4. The tab continued to be down til right after the class would have ended.

Now, I had a rough estimate of the time I should have been there but I didn’t know the location of the classroom and I did not necessarily want to go down to school and spend hours in line at 8 in the morning. So, I dropped it. I’m glad to have done so. While the people around me tell me I take nice photographs, I don’t think I could handle being graded on them. I’m only artistically minded to a certain extent, then I lose the grasp of art.

Aside from those things, I had a fun time exercising with my friend Rick as the first of one of our muscle toning work outs. We did that P90X thing, and WOW! It is difficult. Talk about wanting to kill yourself. The only one we have done so far was arms/shoulders and it was sooo many push ups. My arms were killin me all weekend! Very fun though. Sadly, I have been slacking on my bike riding endeavors. Woops! Although my excuse for that is that my best friend Sara was in town all weekend and we were literally out from morning til night.  Has my healthy eating got out the window?

Just a smidge. I ate alright, I guess. There are not any healthy fast food options on sundays, I’m convinced of it. It’s frustrating! I’d love to have non-mexican food options to eat that are healthy. We did discover how much of a light weight I am while watching the Magic game on sunday and I had 3 beers. I was extremely tipsy! I used to be a champ, but I suppose not drinking for a long time will do that to ya. 😉

One of the things we did do though, was watch It’s Complicated. Which is where I got the recipe for Croque Monsieur. Well, the idea for it then I looked up the recipe and tweaked it a bit.

What you do is make a sandwich with ham (I used smoked turkey) and cheese. The order is the strange part. 😉

You’ll need:

• 2-4 slices of bread depending on your number of sandwiches.
• 2-3 slices of meat per sandwich
• shredded cheese or sliced cheese to generously cover one slice of bread.
• butter!
• eggs (optional)

Preheat your oven on broil to 300 degrees. Take your bread and use 2-3 slices of deli meat and place it in between the slices you’ve cut. I used french bread, too, since it gets crispier than whole wheat slices and, lets face it, is more photogenic.

After you’ve done that, butter the outsides of the bread generously and place in a medium-low frying pan.

Brown, then flip over to brown the other side. I had to use my fingers to make sure it didn’t fall apart as I flipped with a spatula, but it worked nicely. Much easier than flipping eggs if you ask me. 🙂

Once the oven is preheated and your sandwiches are browned on each side, remove from heat and place your cheese on top. Then place either on a baking sheet or on the rack of the oven.

Make sure to keep your oven door cracked so that your cheese doesn’t sweat.

Once the cheese begins to brown, remove and place on plate.

Make sure Lou enjoys herself while rolling on the floor.

If you’re like me and wanted to make sure it was a filling meal, I added eggs to the top to create Croque Madam. I’d definitely love to make them poached eggs but I have not yet attacked that beast!

My opinion? I enjoyed it. However, I’d definitely use a stronger meat next time. The turkey was way too bland for the sandwich but I don’t eat ham so it was my only substitute. Bacon and turkey would probably be my next combo.
Either that or next time I’m just going to make the bread with cheese and cover it in tomatoes 😉 Yum!

Are there any recipes you would like me to try? I’d love anyone to give me some ideas, I’m running out of things to make! I’m in a rut.