Bacon Egg Toast Bites?

Stumbleupon – the nightmare browser add-on that will keep you up for hours after you told yourself you had to go to bed – is great, because you and your wife can swap recipes and pictures of dogs and cats and other funny things without even talking to each other about it!

So that’s pretty much what we did here.

Stumbleupon directed Mary to this article, and the allure of an entire breakfast in one small muffin-sized area was too great to resist.

If you read through that article, you’ll see that I’ve deviated from that recipe a tiny bit – but not really enough to make any difference. I used wide, thick sliced bacon – which may have actually been the wrong way to go. Thinner bacon would have crisped up faster, allowing the eggs to cook less.

But you be your own judge. This recipe yields six.

YOU WILL NEED:

• 6 slices of bread
• 6 slices of pepper bacon
• 6 medium eggs
• Shredded cheese (I use a chedder/colby mix)
• salt, pepper, or whatever you like with breakfast

YOU WILL NEED TO:

1. Grease a muffin pan. I used butter, since I was out of spray.
2. Preheat your oven to 400. YES FAHRENHEIT.
3. Cut circles of bread out of the slices. I used a pint glass. They fit really nicely down into the bottoms of the muffin areas. Depressions? Pockets? Cups?
4. Press those bread circles down into the muffin places.
5. Cook the bacon on the stove (in a skillet) – but not all the way. Keep them a little floppy, but make sure they’re well on their way – browned a bit. Maybe 4 minutes.
6. Fit the bacon strips around the inside of the muffin places, making a ring on top of each bread circle.
7. Throw some cheese down into each bacon-y cup.
8. Cook in the oven for around 5 minutes – the cheese should be well on the way to melting, and the bacon will crisp up a bit more.
9. Take the muffin pan out. Crack each egg and drop them into your bacon cups.
10. Season, or add more cheese.
11. Put back in the oven until the egg whites stop jiggling when you shake the pan – around 8 or 10 minutes.
12. Remove from the oven – they pop out really easily with a fork or spoon. Eat em!

  

*Mine were a little overly cooked. I made two without bacon for Matt, who is not of the meat-eating persuasion, so the timing was a bit off for getting everything cooked just right. His breakfasts didn’t have the ring-o-bacon protection.

Thanks to The Noshery for posting such a great idea!

Super Party

So every year (for the past 8, anyway) Chicago comedy group Big Dog Eat Child (have I mentioned them?) has hosted Super Party at the Ashbary Coffee House in Willow Springs, IL (basically Chicago). So this year, I decided that Ad Liberation should invite themselves to perform (another parenthesis!)!

Jeez, what an introduction. To rephrase that mess, we performed at Super Party this past weekend! (Neither “this” nor “last” sounded right before “weekend”, since it’s both already and only Monday.)

Well, we sort of performed. Matt and I were the only ones that could make it. So we cobbled together an IMPROV SUPER GROUP from THREE DIFFERENT GROUPS and lots of BOLDNESS.

And we called ourselves Craz Factoration! Our lineup was Lauren and Tom (The Crazy Monkeys), Will and Shauvon (Factory Dinosaur), and Matt and I (Ad Liberation). And if I could be so bold as to say we rocked the house, I would say that we rocked the house. (We rocked the house.)

But!

I am getting ahead of myself a bit, because I am a responsible blogger, and I would like to keep things in at least some semblance of chronological order here. SO, let’s talk talk. And because I sort of feel that this post is long enough, I’ll try to be brief (tee-hee).

In Chicago!

  

S(t)inkhole!

Awesome picture! Of a tall guy!

Green Room Rockers album!

Nerd Games!

Hailstorm!

Funny hat!

Practice at The Second City! Super Awesome!

Matt tried Malört!

 

Terrible Soda!

Now, somewhere in there between practicing at Second City and the bottle of Malört, we drove to the Ashbury and performed. And man did that show feel good. We practiced our format several times with this group to make sure we were ready – including once right before the show – and it really paid off. Big Dog should be posting the video sometime soon, at which point we’ll download it and post it up on our website. I am excited for you to see it – the crowd was awesome, and the energy was really incredible. Stuff was happening. And overall, the show didn’t get (too) inappropriate! Maybe a little, but not too bad. The Ashbary is sort of a hipster-metal type coffee shop (it has a bar upstairs in the venue, so… yeah. That.), so we went with the vibe we got.

And I got no pictures of the actual show or during the show or anything. Oh well. THIS WAY IT’S MYSTERIOUS.

We also got to hang out with Will and Shauvon and Shauvon’s garlfriend Alyson (she’s up in that picture), the latter two of whom were kind enough to let all of us crash at their place for two nights, putting them out considerably. They also have a really adorable three-legged cat named (Sm)Elliot who I did not get a picture of because I am the worst but who I did hold because I am the best.

Oh! And we also got to guest star in an episode of The Expert(MAHAPTE)Cast! You can find it (soon) and other episodes on their website, or you can search for them on iTunes!

Rolo Pretzel Walnut Snack Things

I don’t want to call these “turtles”, really, because I don’t think they’re quite there. But really, they’re turtles. So that’s probably what I’ll call them in the recipe list. And they kind of look more like turtles than other turtles. I don’t know.

And since there are quite literally thousands of recipes for these on the internet already, I’m not sure it really matters.

This is really just a quick recipe to get my back on my cooking feet. Summer is hard. Too many (or too little) things to get in the way of serious blogging.

Anyway, let’s get started! Only a few more lines of text before we’re clear of the opening picture, so we’ll get going very soon.

YOU WILL NEED:

• pretzels
• Rolos
  (On a different recipe, someone put “circular chocolate-covered caramel candies”. Let’s be frank, people.)
• walnut halves

YOU WILL NEED TO:

1. Get your oven hot. Around 325 or 350 should do it.
2. Dump about half of the bag of pretzels onto the cookie sheet. Spread them around!
3. Place a Rolo on top of each pretzel.
   
    
   
4. Put them in the oven. Like 5 minutes. Seriously, not long.
5. Take them out, and squish the Rolos down a bit with a walnut half.
   
    
   
6. Let cool. Put in the fridge for about an hour if you want them to firm up.
7. Eat. Eat eat eat.

Makes as many as you want – there are a lot of pretzels in one bag, so you can use however many. I ran out of Rolos before anything else, so let that be what determines how many of these you can make.

Salty/sweet combinations are always a good thing – especially when chocolate’s involved. These are so easy to make, but everyone loves them. See? We’re not so sophisticated. Plus, you can switch things up. There are lots of different shapes of pretzels, you can swap out the walnuts for other nuts or candies – you could use pretzels dipped in white chocolate for the base. So many options. SNACK ACCOMPLISHED.

Adventures at the Lawrenceburg Roach Motel

Our good friend Mike (you know Mike, you know, Mike? Mike Mike?) recently took a position at some high school (I want to say St. Leon) in Lawrenceburg, Indiana. I know I could look that up, but my hands are on the keyboard right now, and I really want to keep that going. After all, my internet browser is also where my Stumbleupon toolbar is.

Anyway, Mike took the position and moved down there about a week ago. It’s about a 2 or 2.5 hour drive, so we are overall pretty bummed that we’re never going to see him again after his new neighbors walk into his unlocked (we told you not to!) apartment and choke punch stab steal all his things him to death. But that’s getting ahead of myself, because originally he didn’t even have those neighbors!

Why not?

Because he decided to rent a room at the roach motel! For honestly real real! We spent the week after he moved (so this past week) watching him Tweet about the roach infestation he was sharing his new apartment with. Here are some grainy cell phone pictures he sent me as proof for me to post on this blog:

  

There’s also a picture of his kitchen up there. Note the general dilapidated state of everything. SEEMS LIKE A GREAT PLACE, EH BOYS?

Well, there’s where we went first, since we had to pick up a few bits of his furniture and move it to his new (his second choice, mind you) place, which is not only less expensive, but larger, closer to his job, professionally cleaned, and (most importantly) roach-free.

I wish I had more pictures of his new place. It is totally adequate in every way. The window is even big enough to get a desk through!

While we were there this weekend, we:

• Went with Mike to IKEA to help him pick out a couch, during which I think he became slightly overwhelmed.
  
   

 

• Assembled the couch back at his apartment, along with a TV stand. Matt replaced an extremely outdated gold-platey-looking chandelier with one Mike bought at IKEA.
  
    
• Enjoyed some whiskey and texting (if there’s one thing I know about mike, it’s that he loves whiskey and texting). We also played a game with quarters (and assorted European coins) called Minefield.
  
   
• Ate at Frisch’s Big Boy! I had a portabella-cap-capped burger (not pictured), and we split a piece of DEEP FRIED CHEESECAKE which was good, but entirely too much cheesecake for one person to handle safely.

 

 

The whole weekend was a good mix of work (moving Mike in, building furniture, driving, etc.) and fun. It was great to see Mike, especially because he’s dead (to us, mostly) now, and will never be seen by anyone again. We did get to enjoy the experience of our car running out of gas – luckily, right as we pulled (coasted) into the parking spot at Mike’s apartment.

On the way home, we took a slight detour through Clayton so I could drive by and show Matt my old house. It was during that slight detour that we saw this fairly startling bit of scenery:

I know what you’re thinking, and yes, it’s true. Someone finally bought a “D” and put it up on the sign. I would have left it, personally, after the twenty years or so that the store’s been without a “D”, but I guess since I’m not the one who bought and now owns the Clayton FooD Store, it’s not my call.