Ham Sandwich Indicted!

If you're a woman who likes to cook, chances are you've heard of Ree Drummond--a city girl who meets and marries a cattle rancher in Oklahoma, with home-on-the-range adventures ensuing.  She cooks, bakes, home-schools her children and writes about all of it. I've only made one other Pioneer Woman recipe--her buttery, decadent cinnamon rolls--and found this to be a good opportunity to further explore her cooking. For our first foray into Ree Drummond's new cookbook, The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Food From My Frontier , my friend and fellow food blogger Shawnie Kelley (of  Manges! Mangi! ) decided to dive in head first with a meal of three dishes and a cocktail.The theme for dinner number one: recipes with alcohol in them. To start, we whipped up a batch of frozen Mango Margaritas, pictured above. As far as frozen cocktails go, these were pretty good...but then, it's hard to mess up tequila and fruit.  They're strong...1.5 cups each of  tequila and triple sec, and...

It's the first of February, but yesterday it was fifty-some degrees and sunny.  With weather that nice in mid-winter, in Ohio, there's only one thing to do: fire up the grill.  My freezer had a complete dearth of grillable items, however, but thankfully,  The Greener Grocer at the North Market has this great thing called the Weekly Fresh Market Bag .  It's essentially a mini-CSA, and they offer a summer and winter season, with seasonal, if not local produce, grains, and cheeses.  I don't have a WFMB myself, but am lucky enough to have a boyfriend that does, and is willing to share. Since this week's bag had (among other things) kale, shiitake mushrooms, and fingerling potatoes in it, we decided to throw an impromptu grilled, winter veggie pizza party. Topped with a variety of cheeses pulled out of my fridge (fontina, goat, and Parmesan) and infused with the smoke from a super-hot grill, it made for a delightful taste of winter with the slightest hint of...