I'm Baaaaaaaaaaaaack!

Hi blog friends!  It's like breathing a huge sigh of relief to be back on here again.  As you may recall from my last post (which you can read here), I put this blog on a hiatus until my husband came home.  Well, I am happy to report that Rex has moved home for good, and I can finally resume my housewifery.  I must confess I'd grown quite complacent.  Cooking for one is anticlimactic, so I got used to sandwiches and eating out.  But then when the Qdoba lady knew my name since I was there so often, I got kind of scared that I was losing my silks forever so I started cooking again, ha ha.  Cleaning took a back seat too.  I would stay pretty picked up, but who was going to notice if there was dust in my corners or if I hadn't scrubbed my shower head?  No one, that's who.  Elvis certainly wasn't going to tell on me.  So I just kind of let it go.  But now my husband's back, so I can feel good about cleaning again!

Come to think of it, I'm quite sure he wouldn't notice dust in the corners or a grimy shower head either, but somehow I feel better when I'm actually cleaning for someone instead of just for myself.

So anyway, this past weekend I went into total housewife overdrive.  In the past few days I completed the following recipes (all from scratch, obviously):

- Chipotle-crusted chicken with mashed potatoes and spiced green beans
- Spaghetti with homemade meat sauce based on the Olive Garden recipe and accompanied by homemade garlic bread (that bagged stuff from the frozen section is SO last year)
- Homemade burritos including guacamole from scratch, sautéed Mexi-spiced chicken, cilantro-lime rice made from scratch, and various other burrito accoutrements
- Cinnamon Amish Friendship Bread (PS that recipe took literally TEN DAYS to make because I had to "grow" the yeast starter.  So yeah, be really proud of me on that one.)
- Chocolate Mint Trifle (a dessert which accompanied a frozen pizza...  I felt bad about cheating on that dinner so at least I made a cool dessert).
- Chicken Tortilla Soup  (homemade, obviously.  What is this "canned" nonsense?)

Since all of that cooking happened over the course of a weekend, you can see that Rex and I have been eating pretty well.  I'm trying to convince him to never leave again, ha ha.  But really, I was just bored because I was on Christmas Break from school and had nothing better to do.  I was actually looking forward to going back to school, but alas.  It wasn't meant to be.  Due to a raging, record-breaking blizzard that has hit Southwest Michigan, I'm now on Day 1 of a (at least) two day snow day spread.  Well, I'm obviously super bored now.  I've already exhausted all of my recipes, and Rex is away at work.  I don't have any grading or lesson planning to do because I'm technically on an extended break.

Basically, I was really bored.  I had nothing to do; no one to serve.  I can't even leave the house because snow drifts are keeping my car from going anywhere (Rex took our Suburban... it's the only vehicle that has a chance in this weather).  I was trying to figure out what to do when I looked down at our dog Elvis and came up with a brilliant idea:

I would make DOG TREATS!

What's more domestic than home-making your dog's food??  Plus, I remembered that I had a really sketchy looking dog treat mix that I got from some guy who lived near the dog park last year.  I bought it for $1.  Looking back, that was actually really dumb.  I got the bag out of my cupboard and looked at it skeptically - it was a bag full of who-knows-what, with no instructions on how to turn this floury mess into edible dog snacks.  It could have been a bag of arsenic and crack, for all I knew.  Alas, boredom makes people do weird things.  I got online and googled "what to add to dog treat mix."  Some recipes were really elaborate.  People are getting weird about what to feed to their pets, like "Add GMO-free wheat that was grown in a sunny location and organic eggs from chickens who only ate organic feed and took occasional classes in philosophy..."  Okay, I'm exaggerating, but only a little.  Finally I figured, "He's a DOG.  He'll eat anything."  So I just added water to the powdery mixture until it made a pasty dough.  Then I cut the dough into dog bone shapes and slapped it in the oven at 350 for 18-20 minutes (because it seems like that's the directions for every run-of-the-mill baking recipe).  When I took them out, they actually looked like dog treats!  What's more, Elvis LOVED them!  He hasn't even died or anything, which I find very promising.  I need to cook for Elvis more often - he's my least picky critic.

I'm on a cooking ROLL.  I need to bake something for Elsie.  Or reorganize another closet.  The Vintage Housewife is BACK, y'all.  Stay tuned for fabulous.