It all started with mushrooms...

As I looked in the refrigerator this morning I noticed two boxes of mushrooms that needed to be used and wasn't really sure what to do with them.  I had originally bought them to make with steak but when I had hit the meat department of the store the steaks didn't look good at all.  So the mushrooms ended in the cart and the steak didn't.  Fast forward to this morning when I wrote a post on Facebook asking for suggestions what I should do with them ...  Steak happened to be the consensus so off to the store I went.  I decided on what looked the best -- some New York strip steaks.  (And Paula from The Cookbook Junkie suggested I blog what I made so here we are.)

A couple of things to note ... I no longer have a gas grill ~ and I have never used charcoal before in my life. 

Now isn't this grill cute?  I picked it up at Target for about $15 and figured it was the perfect size for me to figure out if I even LIKE charcoal - let alone can cook on it.  Yes, it is just as small as it looks ...

I was actually pretty surprised how well it went ... the steaks cooked pretty quickly and evenly and I think I'm now a convert to charcoal.  :)  Hopefully I'll get my blog mojo back and you'll be seeing some more grilled recipes before it turns too cold to grill (hmmm... is it ever too cold to grill?)

As for the mushrooms, they started out looking like this:

 

and ended up looking like this:

And all put together, you get this:

See that bread?  OMG ... that has to be the BEST bread I've made in a long time (yep, I made it!)  I was on All Recipes this morning and came across a post linking this recipe for pretzel bread.  I made the dough in the bread machine and it came out PERFECT.  As a tease, here's a picture of the loaf (the recipe made 4 decent size circles):

Make it, you won't be sorry!

Comments

[Arleen]

Alisha, that all looks yummy, but the bread has me actually drooling as I look at it...wish I was there to sample some of it!

[Carol B]

Yum! I'm going to check the bread out to see if I can make it without a machine.