This is a fairly easy recipe!  Take one small house with not enough cabinet space in which the oven doubles as a cupboard to store a cast iron wok as well as a griddle.  Add one tired wife who’s already spent an hour prepping tomorrow’s crockpot dinner and has moved on to washing and cutting potatoes for that night’s supper.  Mix with one huge migraine from either a lack of caffeine (Skinny Bitch, remember?  So I skipped the morning coffee…) or Aunt Flo’s visit.  Combine for a good 35-40 minutes… and you’ll have burnt oven fries!

LOL

Well, these were supposed to be the Cajun oven fries from Vegan with a Vengeance, but as you can see, they turned into lovely burnt fries.  I really need to get an oven thermometer.  I swear my hubby’s oven doesn’t bake anything as well as mine did.  If I wasn’t backlogged on posting food pics, you’d also have seen by now the maple-glazed potatoes that were underdone the other night.

I’m having a difficult time adjusting to cooking in my hubby’s kitchen.  Aside from what appears to be a finicky oven, his house is much smaller than mine was, and we don’t have enough room for all our possessions.  Read: we haven’t found a spot for everything yet.  That means, I’m constantly forgetting that the wok and griddle are inside the oven… so when I preheat it at 450 degrees to make oven fries, I end up ranting when I have to try to remove these heavy items that have become extremely hot by the time I’ve remembered to extract them.

But I’m learning that simple things can make a difference.  Like a fruit bowl/banana tree combo thingamajig.  I cursed the lack of counter space one evening after grocery shopping, because I had no place to store the bags of onions and oranges I had purchased, as well as two loaves of bread.  They ended up stacked on the counter, right in front of my beloved food processor… so anytime I need to use that (read: often) I’d swear like a sailor as I juggled the fruit and veggies around.  A simple fruit bowl has cured much of that frustration.  We now have a place to store our yummy fruit without raising my blood-pressure each time I want to make hummus.  An added bonus is that the fruit is easily accessible, so my hubby snacks on it instead of reaching for junk food. 

Getting back to the food in the photo above, we paired our torched fries with “Boca’s Original Chik’n Nuggets “made with Natural Ingredients” and used Annie’s Smoky Maple BBQ sauce for dipping.  Mmm, mmm!  Would’ve been better if the fries weren’t so crunchy. :-/

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Just a note to say thanks to everyone who has taken the time to comment on my blog so far!  I’m glad you are enjoying it.  :0)  Some of you have asked great questions, like why I became vegetarian, and whether or not I’d cook meat for my hubby.  If you’ll allow me a few days grace to answer, I’d actually like to address these topics in a blog post.  I think they’re excellent questions and definitely deserve a thoughtful response.  )