Bacon Rosebuds

In honor of Valentine's day, I decided to try a pinterest idea that looked simply amazing...bacon roses. The original site is here, but it looked a little overly complicated. The original pin requires drilling holes in a mini muffin pan. Let's be honest...I'm not one for using power tools or ruining my kitchen items. So, I decided to try it a little differently. First, I preset the oven to 375 and prepped a cookie sheet with crinkled up tin foil so the bacon grease could soak into the creases. Next, I folded strips of tin foil over about 3 times and set them aside. Then, I rolled strips of bacon into a rose shape (1 bacon strip per rose) and wrapped the tin foil strips around them several times leaving the meatier part on the top. I arranged all the bacon roses on the cookie sheet and baked them for 50 minutes. 

For the stems, I decided to avoid the plastic that was in the original post, and I bought green plant stakes from Michael's (I'm sure they're available at any craft store). They're basically green skewers made for floral arrangements. It gives a little more natural and simpler look to the finished product since they're wood rather than plastic and don't have any leaves or thorns. Once the bacon is cooked through, I cooled them, unwrapped them, and stuck them on the sticks. Voila! A unique Valentine's day treat. 

Snow Day Soup

This blog post is dedicated to my two snow days this week, which gave me the chance to relax, catch up on some much needed chores, and make some delicious soup. I decided to make lentil soup inspired by the lemony lentil soup at Zooroona, a middle eastern restaurant in Kalamazoo. I had not tasted it in a while, so I'll have to go back and see how it really compares, but my roommate Lisa says it's pretty close. In my typical style, I did not measure nor did I grocery shop for this particular soup. I knew I had lentils and lemons and everything else came out of the cupboard.

First, I sautéed 3 cloves of garlic and 1 small onion in the bottom of my soup pan. Once those were clearing up, I added chopped celery, carrots, and 3 medium potatoes. I'm pretty sure the original zooroona recipe does not have celery or carrots, but I wanted to sneak a few extra veggies in.

Next, I added approx 2 cups of vegetable broth (made from scratch using water and vegetable scraps and frozen until needed), 1 cup of lentils and about 4 cups of water. I seasoned it with 1 squeezed lemon, 2 bay leaves, a little cumin, salt to taste, and lots of black pepper (this was somewhat accidental; I went to sprinkle a little and a lot came out,  but it turned out well). I covered the soup and let it simmer for a good 30 minutes.

Once the kitchen started to smell wonderful, I checked to make sure the potatoes and lentils were fully cooked and removed the bay leaves. I let it cool for a little while so as not to burn myself and then blended it in the food processor with about 2 cups of coconut milk.

Voila! It tastes great. Now that I've blogged about it, hopefully I'll remember what to do for next time, possibly with some tweaks after going back to zooroona.