What happens when friends are in town...

Remember the last post where I cooked that big ham the first weekend Mike's friend was in town? Well ever since then we really haven't done much cooking cause Mike's buddy wanted to go out to eat all the time and try all these places around Tampa Bay, which was cool and all, but really draining on the bank account and our home cooking time.Unfortunately, Mike's friend has finished his rotation and left town. He will be back again, but probably not till next year. Gives us time to save up some more money :)

One of my bosses at work transferred to a new clinic, so on her last day I made some low fat, cholesterol free chocolate cupcakes (with little powdered sugar butterflies):

 I think I got the recipe from my low fat, low cholesterol cookbook. Anyway, they were super moist and gone by the end of the day.

A few days later, on the 12th, I had Mike cook up some stir fir veggies that we picked up at Aldi's. I just wanted to share Mike's plating with you :

For being from a bag ( with no preservatives, additives, or fake sugars) it came out really good.

 As with every post, Mike craves pizza sometime during the course of the week, so he made some on the 16th:

I think it was olive and spinach pizza with basil. Now you may be asking were the spinach is? Well Mike mixed some of it in with the crust. It was good but I think he over did it on the fresh basil. We have a lot of basil growing in the garden and I just think he wanted to use as much as he could.

On one of my recent trips to Borders, I found this book in the bargain section for only $7.99:

I love her shows on Food Network and The Cooking Channel ( even though we don't have cable any more). Granted a lot of the meals in here are designed for holidays or entertaining there are some easy, 2 person week night meals. I got a deal on bone-in pork chops so I made her crispy pork chop recipe. She asks you to pound them thin before frying, so they are pretty much like pork cutlets:

Look how big that pork chop looks! And I paired it with sweet potato fries (per Mike's request) and the last of the corn on the cob. I know it's a really odd combination, but it worked. Even though the pork isn't that healthy (breaded and pan fried in peanut oil), it is homemade and it didn't cost us that much money :) And here is my wonderful mess :

I have a love/hate relationship with cooking with oil and so does my stove.

Until next time please enjoy this link (I know, a link, not a picture, crazy!).  I saw this in a catalog we got and I am totally going to make some thing like this when I have kids some day (and I mean some day way, way, way, in the future).