Back in the kitchen again

Sometimes I get silly ideas in my head and just have to run with it or it'll drive me crazy.  The latest idea, Super Bowl Party.  The crazy bit, it's just me.  But whatever.  Here is my menu: Gabby's Chili for 20, Cheesy Nachos (which is a bit of a redundant statement, Nachos are, by definition, cheesy.), Pizza Roll ups (recipe from Tidy Mom) and Baked Potato Poppers (recipe from Joelen's Culinary Adventures). I think I'll be eating the left overs on this for the rest of the week.

Anyway, since I won't get to my house until just before the game starts, I figured tonight was as good a night as any to do some prep.  So I started with boiling some Yukon Gold potatoes and browning up some ground beef.

Then it was time to cook up some bacon. Mmmmmmmmm.... Baaaaaaaaacon. (I love splatter screens!)

Once the potatoes were cool it was time to cut them in half and scoop them out.  Basically making little potato boats.

I mixed up the filling for these potatoes and everything went into the fridge.

I then worked on a little bit on a project that's on and off.  Since it's not a critical project, it do a little here and there.  I'm making lemon flavored sugar.  I read how to do in the book Cooking By Flavor that I checked out of the library sometime during the summer. I started off with three lemons, juiced them, cut the remaining rinds into quarters and let those dry out until they were like leather.  Next up, layer regular sugar with your dried lemon rinds in an air tight container and let sit for awhile.  Supposedly when you're ready to use the stuff, you just fish out the rinds and you're good to go.  In my case, I suspect that I didn't wait long enough for the lemon rinds to get all dried out.  I've got some granulated lemon sugar, but I've also got chunks of lemon sugar... you know, like when brown sugar becomes dried out and rock hard.  So I spent some time sifting through the lemon sugar.

And check it out! (Not that you can see it...) But I scrubbed off my range between cooking and sifting!