Cooking at home

In an effort to get healthier and save money, we have been doing a lot of cooking at home. And because our air conditioning is mostly ineffective during the 100'F days of summer, most of this cooking has been done on the grill (or as some of you would inexplicably call it, the "barbecuer"). Some days, we grill 3 or 4 days in a row.

Mimi and Buddy love to look out the door to watch Daddy grilling (especially Buddy).
We have made this salad about 3 times in the past month.
It's got organic spring greens, grilled chicken...

homemade croutons...

bacon and grilled corn. I use a fresh buttermilk ranch dressing on mine,

but Austin likes our homemade lime and mustard vinagrette.

One thing we cooked in the house was a baked pasta made with penne, tomatoes,

italian sausage and fresh mozzarella. We also had broiled cheesy garlic bread.

This was fantastic.

And steak. OMG steak. Steak steak steak.

We go to a decent grocery store that often has excelled steaks for fantastic prices,

because every week they have a different steak on sale.

This steak was a Prime Strip Steak for $6.99 a pound.

(Today, we bought a Porterhouse steak for $8.99/lb)

We also grilled mushrooms as a side dish, and made a chive compound butter to melt on top.

We figured in a steakhouse, this meal would have cost over $40.

And even Buddy gets in to it!

He loves to chew on the corn cobs after we cut the grilled corn off of it for our salads.

No pictures of today's meal, but Austin grilled chicken and corn

that we used in a Hatch green chile stew.

Erin is in Guam!

So here I am in Guam! I am here for only 8 days, working with the US Navy. I am staying at the Hilton Guam Resort and Spa, on the ocean. It's beautiful here. On Monday and Tuesday, after work, I went swimming in the ocean, and I thought that I could come back to the states and say that I went swimming in the ocean every day after work, but the rainy season spoiled my plans. It's been raining for the past two days. We are 16 hours ahead here in Guam, so it's actually late Thursday, 5pm, while it's Thursday 2am back in the states for those of you on central time. One of my students offered to show me around the island tomorrow, so I will hopefully have some more great pictures if the weather holds. All of the pictures above were taken right near my hotel on Tumon Bay.