A FRIDGE FULL OF FOOD...

The Rest of the Vegas Trip: Bellagio, Quark's, the Spa, & The Soprano's Slots

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The Bellagio Hotel has two things I love about Vegas:  this Conservatory with its multitudinous gardeners who change out this display for each and every season and its art museum.  This trip the art museum was "American Modern" which makes me go "meh".  Yes, I know it's mostly from my ignorance of the period, but still, "meh" was all I could muster so we spent extra time in the Conservatory where my heart truly was.  Two of my favorite flowers, that I have none of around my home (and why is that?), hydrangeas and miniature roses flowed through these beds.

The middle has the interwoven shrubs of moss and hydrangeas with disappearing water fountains (more pics after the click) and then trains ran along both sides. The far end is mountainous with animatronic eagles in their aerie on this side and a miniature Bellagio diorama and Mt. Rushmore on the back side.

Planning a Wedding? Needing to get into that dress by a special occasion?

A Fridge Full of Food, specifically the Doctor's Kitchen Monday series, has been featured on local news reporter, Michelle Sherwood's, "Ozarks Buff Brides".  Michelle gives tons of "getting ready for the wedding" advice including lots of diet tips we should all keep on top of. You can find her at:

Tried & Tasted Event: Tastes Like Home/Peanut Butter Exhibition #2: Addie's PB Smoothie

A couple of great food blogging events folks have contacted me about events that I wanted to share with you:

Zlamushka's Spicy Kitchen does a monthly event called "Tried and Tasted" where she features a food blogger for us to cook from and share our results with that blogger's recipes. I love this idea!  We all do it anyway, like passing around recipes from a potluck.  A while back I had made a dish from this month's chosen blog Tastes Like Home and this reminds me that I need to make this again, SOON.  If you haven't been to Cynthia's Tastes Like Home, go there when you have a chance.  She's a lovely person and her food and photos are incredible.  While you're there print off and make her Cook-up Rice or give my version, Chicken and Rice with a Twist a try.  Also, be sure to go over to Zlamushka's Spicy Kitchen to see all of Cynthia's recipes that have been cooked up this month.

Also, another event that will have me browzing and clicking my way through the entries is the Great Peanut Butter Exhibition put on by Peanut Butter Boy and Foodaphilia, and breakfast is their theme. Oh yeah, come to Momma.  There's nothing like peanut butter to cure what ails you and bring you back to those cozy memories of being a kid. 

I have to tell you that Auntie Miranda was telling me the other day that she loves to toast whole wheat pitas and then fill them with peanut butter, bananas, and honey.  She said the ghost of Elvis is haunting her trying to get a bite.

So give that a try and check out Addie's Peanut Butter Cup Smoothie here.  If you love peanut butter but don't like your smoothie's supersweet, this is the smoothie for you.  And then with smoothie in hand, check out all the other peanut butter breakfast goodies Peanut Butter Boy and Foodaphilia were sent.

Thanks for the heads up on these two great food blogging events!Round ups should be posted in the next couple of days for both events.

Comp Memorial Day Weekend in Vegas Report: Robin Williams and The Burger Bar, but not together...

What? This pic is not impressive? Yeah, well that's because I took it before the venue filled and did so with my cell phone and we all know how wonderful cell phone pics are. Not.  Screw the pic, the show was AWESOME, once in a lifetime.

The story is that Gene and I have been to Vegas a number of times over the year. He's always very meticulous about keeping us in players cards and using his both in his slot play and being tracked by the pit bosses when he plays blackjack, craps, or poker.  Me? I'm meticulous about losing my players cards.  One, I don't gamble that much, and two, I can only do one thing at a time: either remember to collect my money or remember to collect my player's card. I choose the first. My brain shuts down on the second.

After all these years we finally got a truly nice reward from a casino.  The Luxor sent Gene an offer for a comp weekend and comp show tickets.  (I admit I didn't believe him when he said the show would be Robin Williams, not some magician we'd never heard of but it was true.)  They comped four nights plus two RW show tickets, worth $250/seat.  So then I figured they'd be in the "comes with your own oxygen cannula" section but this photo is taken from our seats (before everyone got there--it was a sold out show.) They were perfect for us.  I actually don't like being on the floor if I'm too far back because no matter which of our seats I pick some giganto man in a cowboy hat sits in front of me and I can't see squat.

Enough about the seats. The show was fabulous. It was everything we could have wished for.  Robin Williams in concert is the same as Robin Williams everywhere else: you just about pee your pants laughing and wonder how in the hell his brain works. He should donate his brain to science when he dies because he's the ultimate combination of ADD, intellectual, and 8-year-old boy.  The jokes were fast and furious. I've never heard anyone talk so fast AND I finally found the one person who drops the F-bomb more than I do (hurray!).  I said to Gene as we were leaving "If he's that insane now that he's out of rehab, what the hell was he like in concert (and personally) when he was a coked up alcoholic?"  Every time I see him I think of an interview I read a while back where a reporter made the comment that it would be so cool to be the child of Robin Williams because your book-before-bed would be a performance but his response was that his kids roll their eyes and say "No voices, dad. Just read it."  Hey, no matter what you have you want something else, eh?  That story always makes me smile.

Happy Memorial Day Weekend

Gene and I got a deal from the Luxor in Vegas that was too good to pass up: comp nights plus comp tickets to Robin Williams.  How can we turn that down?

See you guys next Thursday.  Hope everyone has a fun, sunshine-filled, safe Memorial Day!

More from Michelle's Party: Lynn's Chocolate Chip Cheese Ball

Okay, so here it's more like a dip but that's only because we didn't have time to thoroughly chill it and then roll it like a cheese ball.  Served on vanilla and chocolate graham crackers, this is a quick and easy treat! Everybody loved it. Jordan loved it so much she got one of my recipe cards and went and got the recipe herself for me with instructions that she wants it at her birthday party in June.

The one funny thing was Lynn brought most of her ingredients and whipped this together at my house. She called before leaving Joplin to ask if I had vanilla in the house....Does the pope wear a hat?  Me? Baking supplies? Gene said to her "Silly girl, she probably give you a choice of five different kinds!"  Lynn laughed and said, "I know. I just wanted to be sure since I DON'T have any."

They were both wrong.  I only had THREE kinds of vanilla.

Bread Baking Babes: The Poilane-style Miche

   

For our May project, Sher from What Did You Eat chose the incredibly worth-every-day it took to constuct it, Poilane-style Miche.  Not only was this fun to make, it was a great reminder that instant gratification isn't always as gratifying as really working to get a wonderful end result. 

Although it should have taken something like seven days from wild yeast starter to golden brown house-perfuming perfection, because of my work schedule and MIchelle's party, I think I tapped in at an incredible ten days to make this bread!

And you know what? It was worth every minute! Thanks, Sher, for such a lovely May selection. I'll be making this one again.

I did have one small grin-worthy event along the way.  I'm the epitome of the saying that "the only bad thing about instant gratification is that it's too damn slow!"  One night in the middle of all that when I had my firm starter retarding in the fridge, I needed a bread for a casserole dinner I'd made for Gene and decided to see how close to the real dough the firm starter was.  Not bad.  Pretty "wild" in it's sourdough-ness, but not bad.

But of course the real boule came out great. Much better than I thought it would.  My seed culture seemed a little retarded (ha!) and then my barm didn't seem to want to rise ... but I was wrong. What I thought would bake like a brick turned out to be a lovely, dense loaf with bubbles even!  (Where did those come from? :-)  )    I'll be taking some of that to work tonight.  I owe it all to you, my fellow Bread Baking Babes who advised and encouraged me through those seed culture and barm days!

Our group:  The Bread Baking Babes:

Our host kitchen for May: Sher of What Did You Eat who picked this lovely miche for us and tooks us on a grand baking ride.

Notitie Von Lien (Lien), My Kitchen In Half-Cups (Tanna), Bake My Day (Karen), Cookie Baker Lynn (Lynn),I like To Cook (Sara) , Lucullian Delights (Ilva), Grain Doe (Gorel), The Sour Dough (Mary aka Breadchick)

Michelle's Graduation Party

My cousin, MIchelle, has been commuting over an hour and a half each way for a year now to finish up her Bachelor's Degree.  We're so proud of her we threw a big party for her at mine and Gene's house following the graduation ceremony.  Not only was it a great family get-together, we got to spend time with some of her family from West Plains that we never get to see.  (Everybody now wants to go drinking with Aunt Lynnette!)  Here's the beaming little grad and her parents, Willard and Gail:

And here's the cake:

Michelle picked the cake to be white cake with white chocolate buttercream filling and I chose to cover it in chocolate marshmallow fondant (recipe from Misty to follow) over a thick coating of the buttercream to get her favorite color scheme:  chocolate brown, teal, and pink.  I chose the single pink rose to represent Michelle's personal email signature line the whole time she's been in college:

"There came a day when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."   ---Anais Nin

Introducing: Nannie and Lucy

This is my Nannie, the one that you all so kindly sent your well wishes about when she had pneumonia.  She's all dolled up for the nursing home Mother's Day Beauty Pageant.  Isn't she pretty?  She grew flowers, tons of them all over her yard, for years.  I love that they chose a floral dress and hat.

And then this is Nannie's latest great grandbaby, Lucy, although with a face this sweet, Colleen and Matt should have just cut straight to the chase and named her "Heartbreaker".

Remember Gene Asking for Peach Cobbler?

Last time I was at the Amish Country Store in Branson I bought a jar of Brandied Spiced Peaches. Gene liked them so much he asked me to get more on my next visit and make cobbler.  That was a great idea on his part. Already, seasoned, all I had to do was mix a couple of Tbsps of flour into the diced peaches (after draining off almost all of the syrup), rolled out a quick crust, and we had cobbler in under a half hour.