Disney Pictures on Shutterfly

I finally put our Disney pictures on Shutterfly. They've been on Facebook for a while so some people have seen them. If you don't know our Shutterfly site address, drop me an e-mail and I'll send it to you.

Recipe of the Week for 1/17 - Stuffed Onions

I'm sitting here watching one of my favorite cooking-related shows, BBC America's Last Restaurant Standing, so I thought I'd try to catch up on my cooking-related blogging.

This recipe comes from one of the regular guest bloggers on The Pioneer Woman Cooks!, Kay from the Netherlands. Having gotten over my childhood hatred of peppers, I've been wanting to make stuffed peppers. However, Alec doesn't like peppers. So, when I saw this recipe, I thought it might be a good compromise.

I changed the recipe a bit from the original, mainly because it calls for ground beef, and since I don't eat beef, I used ground turkey. I've listed the recipe as I made it, the original recipe can be found here: Stuffed Onions, by Kay.

Stuffed Onions
adapted from The Pioneer Woman Cooks, guest blogger Kay

Ingredients
2 onions
1 clove garlic
1/2 pound ground turkey (half a package)
stale bread
1 Tbsp sweet chili sauce
1/3 c. grated cheese (we used an apple smoked cheddar. Kay also suggests Gouda.)
4 c. chicken broth
1 tsp. salt
pepper
nutmeg

Directions
Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Season the turkey with salt, pepper, nutmeg and sweet chili sauce. Knead well.

Cut off the tops of the onions, peel them and cut a small slice off the bottoms so they won't fall over. Use a spoon to loosen the layers of the onion and scoop them out. Make sure you leave at least 1/3 inch of onion layer.

Roughly chop the onion you removed. Mince the garlic. Crumble up the stale bread.

Brown the turkey. Remove from the heat and drain it. Add some olive oil to the pan and cook the chopped onion for about 4 minutes, then add the garlic. Put the meat back in. Add the breadcrumbs. Stir to combine. Turn off the heat and add the grated cheese.

Set the onions in a baking dish and fill to the top with the meat mixture. Pour in the chicken broth until the onions are 1/3 to 1/2 covered in liquid. Loosely cover the dish with aluminum foil.

Bake onions for about 1 hour. Lower the oven temperature to 350 degrees. Take out the onions and spoon some of the broth over them. Put them back in the oven, uncovered for 20-30 more minutes, until the onions and topping are golden brown.

The Photo
Here's a photo of the dish. It looks a little lonely on the plate. I think we had rice with it, but I don't really remember. The Verdict
First of all, the chili sauce was a bit difficult to find, even in our fairly well stocked grocery store. We asked the lady who makes the sushi there (yes, our grocery store has a sushi bar, and yes, it's good!) and she directed us to an Asian market (who knew we had one!). A very nice lady at the Asian market recommended her favorite brand of chili sauce (Caravelle) and we bought a huge bottle, for about $3. She says it's good just to pour over chicken and as a dipping sauce. So, I'll be experimenting with other uses.

And, hopefully I'll find some good ones, because we didn't love this dish. Apparently, Alec doesn't really like onions, either (he might have mentioned that when I suggested stuffed onions as a dish). I do like onions, but this was a little much for me. I did really enjoy the filling and so I might try doing something else with that, maybe as a turkey burger.

A New Laptop!

I'm writing from my new Sony Vaio laptop. Why do I suddenly have a new laptop, you ask? Well, here's what happened:

I've been gone for over a week on a work trip, so this morning I started work as usual. My computer was running a little slowly, but that's nothing new. I worked on paperwork from the trip for most of the morning, plus helped out a couple of clients.

Around 12:45, I took my lunch break and watched TV for a bit.

Around 1:45, I headed back into my office. My computer was "asleep" so I shook the mouse to wake it up. It didn't, so I tried to reset the mouse. The computer still didn't wake up. So, I hit the spacebar a couple of times. It still didn't wake up.

So, I called Rick in. He asked me if I was working on anything that wasn't saved. I did have a Word document open, but I hadn't done much with it, and I figured I could remember what I had down so far. So, we decided to reboot the computer.

When it came back up, I had a black screen with some message about hard drive failure. We tried a few things and couldn't get it to come back.

Since I can't work without my computer, we headed out to shop for a new one. After hitting Circuit City, Sam's Club, Wal-Mart and Best Buy, we found a great deal at Office Depot.

I'm now the proud owner of a Sony Vaio laptop. And, it's pink.

Honestly, I didn't get it because it was pink. That's just an added bonus. When I called my office to check and see if the tech guys thought it was a good deal, and a good computer, they promised not to make fun of me for having a pink laptop, at least not to my face!

Of course, the bad part about the crash is all the stuff I may have lost. Fortunately, I recently saved most of our photos to CD's in a effort to free up some space on the old computer. I know the ones from our trip in October were still on there, but Rick has those on his computer, so we can transfer them. Our Thanksgiving, Christmas and Disney photos are still on our memory card, so I can download them again. (M.K. - I'll need to get your Disney photos from you again!) There's a ton of work stuff on the old hard drive, though, so we're going to try to see if we can find someone to get the info off it. But, I don't have much hope.