Being putzy

Man, I have been slacking off in a lot of areas lately. I have been taking the easy road with cooking, have barely maintained the house, barely updated this site... The only creatures in the Just Not Dinner household to benefit from my slack-age are the hairdroppers, who have enjoyed snuggling with their lazy momma.

Ah, to heck with it. Everyone's entitled to a little down time, right?

Tonight, I updated my GF blog links - sorry to anyone I missed. I have been finding and reading more and more sites, logging my bookmarks, and never updated my link list so the rest of the multitudes () that read Just Not Dinner can know about them too.

I have no choice but to get the house in shape during this weekend - The Man and I are hosting our second annual Cubs Home Opener Party on Monday the 9th. This means I get to take a day off of work to wait on a bunch of men drinking beer and yelling absurdities at a TV. But I can be somewhat happy about it because The Man is on vacation the whole week, so any messes that happen will be cleaned up by him for a change!

I am trying to come up with snackies that will have them begging for more (something they have come to expect from me and I just can't disappoint). Of course, this is the first time we have had any sort of party where I didn't have wheat flour in the house. We will be having the standard cheese and ritz crackers (the package will remain on our back porch and will not be brought into the house or the wrath of Sheri will arise), salsa and tortilla chips (both GF), homemade caramel corn, good ol' Wisconsin-style brats (I will make my own 'soaking sauce' with Redbridge - really looking forward to that!), and pizzas will be brought in.

I want to make some sort of warm/hot snack - any ideas out there?

So. Even though I haven't been cooking, I sure have been eating. So here are a few things I have tried over the last week.

Bakery on Main's Apple Raisin Walnut Granola. I had this for breakfast yesterday. It's pretty good and stayed fairly crunchy after a dousing in milk. I also snacked on it dry for breakfast at work this morning and again, pretty dang good. I was a little disappointed in the cinnamon amounts used - when I am eating a granola, especially one with apples in it, I really want to taste cinnamon and that's not the case here. But still very good. I will be on the lookout for more flavors to try.

Oskri Cashew Bar. See the Oskri granola bar I posted about a while ago. In my opinion, it's basically the same bar.

Mi-Del Arrowroot Cookies. Anyone else over the age of 30 get cravings for animal crackers? This was a case of "I came, I saw, I bought" while wandering the store looking for a snack. Thinner than the gluten-y animal cracker, the taste is similar to the "real thing." These could probably use a little more sweetener, but they help me kick the animal cracker craving. As a matter of fact, the bag is sitting open on my end table right now - for every sentence or two I type, another cookie gets stuffed in the gaping maw. Now, the package states that this product is produced in a factory...blah, blah,blah...., but it also states that their gluten free products are routinely tested to ensure gluten free status.

Somebody take these damn things away from me.