Night at the Improv

That pretty much describes our dinner tonight. I was completely planning on making lasagna. I got all the meat and sauce ready, made the cheese mixture, and then realized I have no lasagna noodles. I do, however, have a pantry full of various pastas, so I decided to try something. I pulled out a box of manicotti shells, and decided to try crock pot stuffed manicotti. I stuffed the cheese into the center of the uncooked manicotti shells, added some extra water to the sauce, and layered it up in my crock pot. Hopefully it will work similar to crock pot lasagna. If not, we'll get a good laugh at yet another cooking flop on my part, and we'll either make the best of it or figure something else out.

Part of the deal with our relocation is that they will move the freezer for us, but it has to be emptied out before they will move it. Uggh! That is a LOT of ground beef, steak, and venison to eat in the next month. And I'm not really much of a red meat person, so finding meals that I actually enjoy eating is going to be quite a challenge. I will either have developed quite an affection for red meat by the end of this, or I will be 100% sick of it, and we'll live on chicken & fish for a week straight! We'll see.

Lunch today was cheeseburger sliders. Love that! My mom and Mike got me a slider skillet for my birthday, and I've used it a few times now. I'm starting to get a pretty good technique! :) So easy really, and the kids eat them so much better than a big giant cheeseburger. (I know it's hard to tell in this picture, but the buns are actually dinner rolls. They sort of look like full-size sandwiches in this photo.)

I also improved on a bit of a snack for later. I used peach applesauce & strawberry applesauce in the dehydrator to make homemade fruit roll-ups. Hopefully they taste okay. We'll see. This could be a really interesting eating night. :)