A Wonton By Any Other Name

Here's a fun little appetizer I made recently. It looks really nice when it's done, so people think it takes a lot of work (it doesn't). It's pretty easy, doesn't involve many ingredients, and tastes great. This is our 16th recipe of the year and can be found here on Allrecipes.

The Recipe

Sausage Flowers

1 Pound Ground Italian Sausage

1/2 Cup Shredded Monterey Jack Cheese

1/2 Cup Shredded Colby Jack Cheese

1 Cup Salsa

24 Wonton Wrappers (3-1/2") 

Sour Cream

Green Onion

Grease a mini muffin pan and press wonton wrappers into it to make cups (see picture below). Brown the sausage, then drain and remove from heat when cooked through. Combine the cheese and salsa with the sausage and place a tablespoon of the mixture into the wonton cups (or "flowers"). Bake in a 350 degree oven for 10 mins or until the wonton edges begin to brown. Remove from the oven, place the cups on a serving dish, and top with sour cream and green onion.

End Results and Final Thoughts

This is a very easy dish to make and was a big hit. What's nice is that it's very flexible. You can use whatever you want for this dish. Don't like sausage? Fine, use seasoned beef, shredded chicken, canned tuna (although you may want to rethink the salsa and cheese in this case), whatever! Don't like sour cream? Then just top it with extra cheese (that's what I did with half of the batch I made), more salsa, coleslaw, you name it! Want something completely different? Fill the wontons with ham and cheese, peanut butter and jelly, or roasted veggies! Whatever you want! This is my favorite part of looking at new recipes - not to see what they want you to do, but to see what I might want to try. Yes, there are recipes I wouldn't alter in any way... but nine times out of ten I'd rather have a general concept that I can apply to whatever sounds good (or is in the fridge) at the time than have a very rigid recipe. Maybe it's because I'm not very good at following directions, or maybe it's because I'm the second most ridiculous man in the world, but that's how I operate. And if any of you can think of other good fillings (besides crab meat and cream cheese...), let me know. I'm curious to see what other ideas are out there.

Thanks for reading and have a good weekend!

Two Down...

Last week we celebrated our second anniversary! We celebrated with a long weekend on Mackinac Island - our first real vacation that we've taken with just the two of us since our honeymoon (although we've been on other vacations with Leslie's family and with my family).

We left Thursday after work, stayed overnight in Lansing, and then arrived in Mackinaw City around noon on Friday. We checked out the old lighthouse and then booked our ferry ride. We had a little time before our scheduled departure, so we took a look around the touristy downtown area to see what they had to offer. Unfortunately it was a little chilly, so we didn't take advantage of the many ice cream and fudge shops. Maybe next time.

The Old Lighthouse

Mackinac Bridge

Shepler's Ferry

The ferry left at 1:30 and got us on the island with plenty of time left in the day (the ferry ride itself was an adventure - apparently we were on the party boat, as there was a large group of elderly and middle-aged women wearing matching shirts and doing jello shots to celebrate Grandma's birthday or something... go figure). Our first stop on the island was at the Draught House at Mary's Bistro for lunch. They have loads of craft beer on tap, most of which are from Michigan breweries. We had a few pints, a good lunch, and took some time to plan out the rest of our day.

Look at all those taps!

Lamb Burger for me!

Leslie's Chicken Pot Pie

After lunch we headed to our hotel, the Island House, to check in. It's a beautiful old building and apparently one of the oldest hotels on the island. I had found a deal online that included a discounted rate for two nights, free breakfast both mornings, bike rentals, some fudge, and a voucher for dinner at the hotel restaurant. I had bought this deal and booked the room way beforehand, but somehow there was a mix up with our room. To make up for it they upgraded us to an ever nicer, larger room. No complaints here.

From there we got some bikes (fo' free, thanks to the aforementioned vouchers) and headed out to explore the island. We rode around the island and checked out some of the sites in the park. It's a nice, easy one hour ride around the whole island and we had a lot of fun seeing everything, especially some of the impressive vacation homes (mansions, really) along the shore.

We checked our bikes back in at the hotel and then headed downtown to explore the shops. There are lots of fun little stores selling everything from fudge and candy to fresh-baked dog treats and custom stationery. Once we had checked out all the stores, and picked out our free fudge, we decided to get some pizza at one of the bars downtown (where we once again encountered Grandma's party group). A good end to a good day.

Local jams, sauces, etc.

Michigan Wine!

Mackinac Shirts Everywhere!

Sander's - we bought lots of fudge here

We didn't get these... I'm already perfect

Saturday morning started off with breakfast at the hotel (and they had a really great breakfast hash with mushrooms and potatoes and all kinds of good stuff... it was great). After that we went down the street to check out the Butterfly House. Yep, it's exactly what you'd think it is - a bunch of butterflies and insects. It was actually really cool. Besides having hundreds of live butterflies fluttering around they have glass display cases with lots of other stuff. I don't think I'd make a day out of the place, but it was worth a look.

After that we stopped by St. Anne's Church and headed up to Fort Mackinac. The fort was pretty impressive. There are a lot of buildings to see with loads of informational plaques, historic pictures, and various artifacts. They also have a few guys dressed in period uniforms to answer questions and do cannon / rifle demonstrations throughout the day. After exploring the fort we saw a few more sites on the island, got a bite to eat, bought more fudge, and then headed back to the room to rest our feet and warm up (it was chilly that day and had rained a bit... Leslie was cold). Later that evening was dinner at the hotel restaurant, which was delicious. We left full and happy, but not too full to eat a little more fudge back in the room.

The next day, our last day, was a little more relaxed. We checked out the Art Museum and then explored some parts of the island we hadn't visited yet - there were even more shops just back off the main strip that we didn't get to on Friday. We checked those out, got some coffee from a little local place, and then took the ferry back to Mackinaw City. From there it was a long drive home, but we made it back in good time, much to the relief of the cats.

Fancy Pants Coffee

Frank was clearly very happy to see us...

We had a great time on the island. Mackinac was beautiful and lots of fun, so I definitely think we'll have to find time to visit again.

So that was the end of our Mackinac trip, but not the end of our anniversary vacation! The next day we went to the Indianapolis Zoo. Leslie loves the zoo, so what better way to spend our extra day off! Since it was a weekday it wasn't too crowded and we were able to take our time and see everything at our own pace. The weather was beautiful and it made for a great anniversary day.

But wait, there's more! It wasn't really part of our anniversary, but it was a few days after and was lots of fun. Our favorite comedian, Mike Birbiglia, was performing at Clowes! He's a great comedian and his new show was hilarious. If you enjoy a good laugh then I definitely recommend checking out his Netflix special, "My Girlfriend's Boyfriend," any of his CDs, or his movie, "Sleepwalk With Me."

And that, dear friends, is the end to what was a pretty great anniversary celebration (plus a little more). I hope you're all having a good week and we'll be back soon with more fun and exciting things. Thanks for reading!

The Apparent Garden

We've finally finished up a bit of work outside that we've been going at on and off for awhile. It started off with getting some trees removed a long time ago, and then we got busy with weddings, vacation, work, and everything else. But we're finally at a point that's far enough along to warrant a blog post. And this is probably as far as we'll go this summer, especially considering summer is almost over.

First thing to do once the trees were removed was to dig out the area. It had been a raised bed and there was a lot of dirt piled in there. We're going for a different look, so we needed to get it leveled out a bit.

Before (although we had already removed the retaining wall blocks)

After

After that we lined the bed with edgers. We picked these up from Menards during a sale awhile back and they look pretty neat if I do say so myself.

Then the main event. We had seen a picture of someone's garden where they had used a trellis type structure to hold potted herbs. This seemed like such a neat idea that we wanted to replicated it in a way. So we've put up our own trellis panel and plan on hanging a bunch of potted edibles from it in the spring. Since it's out on this side of the house it should be easily accessible to our neighbors as well. Usually people only need a sprig of this or a few leaves of that, so we can allow others in the area to come grab whatever they need from our wall of plants.

We'll also plant some less functional but more aesthetically pleasing plants (called flowers, I hear) in the bed and make it look all nice and whatnot. But again, it's pretty late in the season so we'll probably just wait until spring. That also gives us time to figure out exactly what we want where.

That's all folks. Thanks for reading and we'll see you next week!