Mardi Gras Fried Rice {Fried Rice with Purple Cabbage, Ham, Egg and Zucchini}

The colors of Mardi Gras in a fried rice--red cabbage, eggs and zucchini (with or without ham)--make this savory seasonal dish a colorful way to let the good times roll.

Why do Mardi Gras recipes have to involve pancakes or King cake? Can't we have some savory entrees alongside? I'm pretty sure the carbs and protein would help with alcohol consumption.

Howdy! I'm feeling a little sheepish here because if you subscribe via email [hey thanks!--if you don't, there's a widget along the right sidebar that makes it easy to do so] you'll know I messed up yesterday. See, I'm only sharing 3 recipes a week, but I'm cooking for the family, the team, the folks at work, and others all. the. time.  Any given week I've got a bunch more than 3 recipes that have the potential to be blog-worthy. These recipes pile up in notebooks and on scraps of paper. The photos pile up--in a well-organized fashion--in my laptop. Eventually I get around to typing them up for the blog, and when I do I tentatively schedule them for when they'd be appropriate. I've got a small butternut squash & spinach lasagna  recipe from last year that I thought would be good for February. I scheduled it for 2/1/2015 thinking that I'd sort out which Monday, Wednesday, or Friday would be best and get the post all buffed and shined [i.e., add photos and the sort of writing you're reading now].

Except I didn't realize that yesterday was February 1st, and there I was at Costco taking photos of my spouse while he tried on new eyeglass frames. [Ya know, if you need to wear glasses it's really hard to tell what you'd look like in new frames since you can't see out of them while you're trying them on . . . where was I?] Oh, right--so while I was at Costco the partially finished lasagna post automatically published, per the scheduling I did last year, and went out on email. I came home from the store to emails from my mom and Alanna notifying me. Whoops.

Now the cool thing of this very long and involved rambling is that Alanna taught me how to save all my partially finished posts as drafts, so theoretically this type of thing will never happen again. But I'd still appreciate it if you'd sign up to get the blog via email, because everyone likes bloopers now and again.

Loaded Pizza Fries #EatWithWest #ChubbyChasingMission #CysticFibrosisAwareness

Beef and salami sautéed with farm share vegetables then coated in a seasoned tomato sauce top these baked fries. Mozzarella and cheddar cheese covers the whole pan in cheesy goodness.

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For the first year of this blog I posted a new pizza recipe every Friday night. I shared recipes for pizza dough, savory pizzas with fruit, vegetarian pizzas and pizzas with meat toppings. I posted so many pizza recipes that I even created a Visual Pizza Recipe Index to keep them all tidy, and a Pinterest board devoted to pizza, Friday Night Pizza Night.
Over the second year I added to the Index more slowly, interspersing Friday pizzas with other types of recipes but broadening the types by adding Deep Dish pizzas [I'll probably add a Deep House Dish category to the VPRI at some point since I'm amassing a collection in my notebook].

Today's post is a three-way collision between a Friday pizza recipe & meaty appetizer, a bonus alternative use for the topping, and a request for my readers to help out a family in my town by posting photos on social media. Let's start with the food, which weaves its way throughout the post. I admit I'm slightly surprised by how this idea of mine turned out. When I started thinking about this recipe, I envisioned some sort of pizza-flavored sloppy joes served on slider buns. Kinda like these:

The flavor of the filling was fine, but it was too . . . sloppy for me. This is when the kids are pretty tickled to come home from school and hear "I'm trying a new recipe. Eat one of these pizza sliders for after school snack and tell me what you think." [They like those days better than the "we've got too many beets in the freezer, here's a smoothie" or "find something to eat, I'm busy editing" days].

I'm posting these photos of my kids eating on the blog for one reason--to encourage a little guy in my town, Weston, to take another bite of food. Weston is 3 and needs to gain some weight, and if he doesn't do it by eating he'll need to have a feeding tube inserted in his tummy. Seeing photos of folks eating tasty food encourages Weston to take another bite, so I've tagged this post with the hashtags #EatWithWest, #ChubbyChasingMission, and #CysticFibrosisAwareness. I'd really appreciate it if you could tag and share photos of you/your kids/your uncle eating and share them on your favorite social media channels too. 

You can read about Weston and his mom's social media campaign here.

Bacon Cheeseburger Tomato Jam Dip

Hot, hearty, cheesy, beefy--I've unpacked the adjectives for this dip, but the name pretty much says it all. It's a bacon cheeseburger dip using tomato jam to provide some bold summery flavor in winter.

Why is it that there's a big eating event in the dead of winter? Sure, sure, Thanksgiving is generally after a frost, but most of the Thanksgiving vegetables lend themselves to long storing or freezing. I'm talking about walking into 3 different grocery stores in 2 days [yes, I get around] and being assaulted with goal posts surrounded by mounds of fresh tomatoes and peppers and avocados. That ain't right.

Fresh tomatoes, everywhere on the mainland US that I've lived, don't taste very good in the dead of winter. It's almost criminal to tantalize shoppers with the prospect of fresh vegetables when the flavor doesn't back up the promise.  I turn to preserved tomatoes (those that I've canned, slow roasted and frozen, or jammed) for my winter time tomato flavor. I'll happily buy a jar of salsa [or crack open a jar of strawberry salsa] but make fresh tomato salsa from the store stuff to eat during the game? Not happening. Not now. I will GORGE myself on fresh tomatoes from July-ish through October-ish, but then I put up as much as possible so that I can enjoy these summer flavors in winter.

Here's another way I use my preserves.

If you're watching the game in shorts and a t-shirt, this recipe may not apply to you. While I like my room temperature snacks, our TV is in the basement along with the Strategic Winter Squash Reserve and I need something to keep me warm while watching.

Sure, sure, having 2 to 3 dogs piled on my lap [occasionally tap dancing on my hard cider-filled bladder] does provide an extra 120 pound layer of insulation. However, it also prevents me from getting up to pee get refills of this savory dip. I suppose that's a form of portion control. You can see a quick pic of us on my FB page.

I made this dip last year* after being inspired by the Bacon Double Cheese Burger Dip at Closet Cooking. I thought that using some tomato jam (from Marisa's recipe at Food In Jars) would provide a bit of bold spicy sweetness to play off of the bacon, so I got busy with some of the cow that lives in my freezer.  This recipe works both as a dip for a sturdy tortilla chip and a filling for a slider bun (those pictures did not turn out as well though).

For other recipes using ground beef, please see my Ground Beef Recipe Round Up, 106 recipes from a whole host of food bloggers covering a variety of eating styles and categories [though there are no desserts using ground beef in this round up. that's icky to me]. Need a hot vegetarian dip? Try my Baked Artichoke and Arugula Dip instead.