Happy New Year, friends!
I know things have been a bit silent around these parts for the past week or so; call it a holiday vacation. LeeLee and I have been enjoying lazing about, quite frankly, and just settling down a bit after an incredibly hectic (but joyous) holiday season! But tonight, the party is over, I’m sorry to say, and here we both are, LeeLee working upstairs, me writing down in my office (and it is a privilege), noses firmly back to the grindstone.
We de-decorated the house from its Christmas splendor this afternoon and evening, which is always the chore we least enjoy during this season! I love all of our Christmas decorations, the way the living room is festooned with all of our traditional favorites, but the time had come for them to depart for another 11 months. Eleven months! It seems to stretch so lengthily in front of us now, but I know it’ll zip right by in a flash.
All of the de-decorating – plus a brunch gathering at our friends’ house that happily stretched until mid-afternoon – meant that there wasn’t a great deal of time to get the ol’ smoker up and running today. So I pulled out my trusty grill pan and cooked IN this evening, whipping up some of our favorites, including LeeLee’s beloved veggie dogs, in the comfort of our kitchen.
But this wasn’t a 100% easy-peasy meal. No, I decided this morning to throw a little extra curveball into the mix by whipping up some hot dog buns for the first time. I used a ciabatta sandwich roll recipe from our friends at King Arthur and rolled each torpedo much smaller and thinner than the good King requested, yielding bread that was more bun-like in nature than sub-like. Would you believe it worked? We were thrilled! I’m not sure we’ll ever go back to store-bought rolls willingly. These sourdough concoctions are something to behold, I’ll tell you.
At any rate, the tater tots took their turn in the oven without incident, and I sautéed the cabbage with a bit of butter, garlic powder, salt, pepper, and nutritional yeast (because of course I did). And the veggie dogs heated up beautifully on the grill pan, as expected! We ate with gusto, cleaning up the entire head of cabbage and the tater tots, and leaving plenty of dogs and buns for the week’s lunches. It’s a great start to the workweek!
:)