This is a good weekend, blogfriends. I passed my thesis defense with flying colors yesterday — the former department chair said it was one of the best theses she’s seen come out of this department — which makes me (almost) officially Dumbass Gourmet, M.A. We celebrated last night by going to a gallery showing featuring some works by my favorite local artist, followed by a heartbreaker of a game at the local minor league ballpark, followed by some red velvet cake ice cream at a downtown cafe. Today, The Husband’s father and brother came to town to visit so we traveled up the highway to Maker’s Mark for a bourbon distillery tour, then came back home just in time for dinner.

Naturally, that’s where I come in. Earlier this week I located a recipe for chicken marsala in a cookbook we bought by mistake several years ago — the absentminded Husband forgot it was in his hand when he went up to the cash register — so I decided to tackle it. We didn’t have marsala wine, so I substituted in a Yellowtail cabernet for the sauce, which is a mix of diced garlic, wine, chicken stock, flour, Worcestershire sauce, and heavy cream, with a healthy dose of mushrooms mixed in for good measure. Betty Crocker kindly offered up a recipe for rosemary onion potatoes, so I shoved those into the oven and got to work on the marsala sauce.

Turns out it takes a while to make marsala sauce. The potatoes were roasted nicely before the chicken was even cooked through, so then commenced a juggling act in which I attempted to cook the chicken, stir the marsala sauce, keep the potatoes warm, and make a salad. And you know what? It actually turned out OK:

Salad with blueberries, blackberries, apples, and mushrooms.

The main course.

Of course, quick work was made of the rest of the cabernet, and now we’re settling in for some watermelon and Yuengling. Look for a bonus Dumbass Gourmet this week, since I’m planning to make the famous breakfast casserole for tomorrow morning. Of course, if the brewskis keep coming, I might decide to scrap that plan and give everyone plain toast instead.

*trumpet fanfare*

Hear ye, hear ye! The Dumbass GourMetpron has arrived!

A bit late, but always fashionable.

Blogfriends, there has been so much going on lately, which is a poor excuse for depriving everyone of Dumbass Gourmet but is nevertheless the truth. I’ve been learning to teach and securing a freelancing gig and getting my arse handed to me at fitness boot camp that meets at six in the morning and networking like you wouldn’t believe so I can get a job, and somewhere in all that it occurred to me that we never had sloppy joes when I was a kid. Not one single time. I’m not sure why this is — Daddy, help me out here — other than that maybe sloppy joes weren’t in my mother’s Betty Crocker repertoire and the stuff in a can was too gross/expensive to buy.

Great. Now the Manwich theme song is looping in my head. At least it replaced the permanent repeat of Adam Sandler’s “Lunch Ladyland.”

A lot of the recipes online list sloppy joe ingredients as ground beef, ketchup, mustard, sugar, relish, and the like, but I don’t get up at the crack of dawn to do high-knees, curls, lunges, squats, and what-have-you just to throw it all away on one little dinner. One suggested slopping some beer into the mix, but I prefer mine on the side:

Don’t mind if I do!

A little more searching led me to Rachael Ray, who — although she spells her name wrong — had a recipe for turkey sloppy joes with tomato sauce. A little onion and garlic, a pinch of Mrs. Dash, some brown sugar and Spatini, and we had sloppy joes on toasted hamburger buns with French fries!

Slop, sloppy joes!

I just had another one for lunch/dinner (Linner? Dunch?) and it was quite good. Being unemployed gives one a new appreciation for leftovers, I suppose. My Sims are making all sorts of delicious things on the Sims 3, and I have been inspired by their little Simlish praises to give ratatouille and/or carbonara a shot. Stay tuned!