Bite My Food: Art City Rip-Off Salad

As it happens, we're one of those families that eat. I know, right? So, as a direct consequence of our food consuming ways, we have also been known to cook. And every once in a while, that cooking leads to a new recipe or two of our very own. Which I'm going to be sharing with you, my darling little readers, right here on my very own blog in a new project series I like to call Bite My Food:

First up is the delectable Art City Rip-Off Salad. I kept ordering the same salad (The Real McCoy) every time we went to Art City Trolley in Springville, so I decided to make my own version of it. The main differences are the dressing, and the fact that mine doesn't contain bacon. It has to be said that I will happily gobble up bacon if someone else puts it in my salad, but I really can't see myself frying up bacon and tossing it with my leafy greens. Don't be frightened by the scarily-named cheese: this salad is pretty, yummy and tastes like summer on a plate!

Art City Rip-Off Salad

Ingredients:

1 Green leaf lettuce head
1/2 cup dried cranberries
5 oz. Gorgonzola cheese (I get the little tubs in the deli section because a) I'm cheap and b) I live in Spanish Fork.)
1/3 cup honey roasted almonds (I buy the Almond Accent bags)
1 large chicken breast in lemon pepper marinade.
Poppy seed dressing (I ever so very strongly recommend Brianna's)

1. Thaw and marinade the chicken for as long as your little heart desires. Slice into strips.
2. Cook chicken in a skillet until it's completely cooked and starting to brown. Set aside.
3. Wash, slice and chop lettuce, place it in a lovely serving bowl.
4. Add gorgonzola cheese, cranberries, almonds and chicken. Serve with poppy seed dressing, or another sweet dressing of your choice.

PS: If you happen to live somewhere where things like honey roasted almonds, gorgonzola cheese and poppy seed dressing are not readily available (like, oh... Norway) and you want to try this salad, leave me a message and I'll help you figure out what might work for you!

Know Your Fork: Icelandic Memorial

Have I ever told you that I love small towns? It's kind of strange, because I grew up in one and therefore spent much of the first 18 years of my life wishing for a more cosmopolitan lifestyle. Something with more shopping and less mangy dogs sleeping in the shade of decrepit farming implements. More culture, less cows.

Anyway - fast forward a decade and I just can't get enough of rural living - from the safe distance of my town home. The CAL Ranch store, horses across the street and did you know we have our own rodeo ground? The other day I saw a guy at Autozone with spurs on his boots! Wait... now I sound like I'm obsessed with cowboys, not small towns. I digress. The point I am trying to make is that small towns have their own little flavour that you just don't find a city or the suburbs. And our new(ish) home of Spanish Fork is no exception. This is what I hope to illustrate in my new blog series, Know Your Fork:

In our quest towards becoming Spanish Fork locals we visited the illustrious Icelandic Memorial. Now, as I'm sure you were all keenly aware of, Spanish Fork proudly boasts the first permanent Icelandic settlement in the United States, commemorated by this memorial.



Because it's not a very big memorial, it didn't take us very long to bask in its Scandinavian glory, so here are some of the highlights:

-First there was the commemorative monument which is actually pretty cool, especially when you take the random house in the background out of the equation. I got all nerdily excited about how much Icelandic I could understand, and it was nice to feel the Scandinavian connection. When you're from where I'm from, you've got to take what you can get.



-Then they had a big chunk of volcanic rock from Iceland which, seeing as Iceland itself is made up entirely of volcanic rock, was like a little piece of Iceland. A little piece of Iceland that had blasted out of the earth's mantle, become part of a country, then been picked up and transported 3777 miles to sit at the intersection of 400 South and 800 East in Spanish Fork, UT.



-And finally, there was the big, stone "lighthouse" memorial. I tried very hard to get a photo of it with the Icelandic flag in the background, but the wind wouldn't cooperate. You can get a better idea of what it looks like in the first picture, I just liked this one:



It also seems there is an Icelandic Festival in Spanish Fork every June, to which we will have to go. Especially seeing as we just missed Thorrablót 2009...

This has been "Know Your Fork".

Change is everywhere.

As I seem to be changing the scope of my crazy project page, I've also changed its title: "52 Weeks Later" is now "Project Project", but will still be found at this URL. Like I have mentioned earlier, instead of doing a project a week, I will now be posting whenever the fancy strikes me.
The cool thing about this is that it opens up the possibility of doing both smaller and larger projects. For example, one of the larger, ongoing projects I have already started working on is Know Your Fork: Spanish Fork Tourist. Every so often I will post about something new and thrilling that this little town of ours has to offer, and you will gawk in wonder and awe. Or something like that.
Or I might decide it would be fun to spend an afternoon shopping the thrift stores (which frankly, gross me out a bit) and then I would post about that. Most of the projects already listed on the sidebar can be adapted to both bigger and smaller projects, and some of them I will leave as week-long activities. Because, really: who wants to only spend an afternoon saying yes or being French?

Oh, PS: Another small change is I added an application that let's you leave me some feedback at the bottom of each post. Check the boxes that say "Like", "Interesting" and "More, please" according to how you feel. This lets me know that someone is actually reading, even if they're not actually leaving comments. Which you are, of course, more than welcome to do. I love me a good comment!

And another PS: One of the "downsides" of doing a project blog is that I don't ever really write about the daily blah-blah-blahs. At least I try not to. For that, I have my other blog: tamsinator.livejournal.com that gets updated every so often with this, that and the other, so if you're in the need of a Tamsin-fix (why, I can't think) that's always a good place to try.