Kicking off the New Year!

So I meant to post pictures of our dinner that we made on New Year's Eve, but our laptop took a turn for the worse and it appears will soon be replaced. Guess we talked about it one time too many and it heard us. Can't seem to find an operating system to even get it started up! back to dinner... Dinner was inspired by Tyler on the Foodnetwork and while good we have some tweeks for next time. The salt crusted steak was ok, but grilled is way better. We also made hashbrowns - the key is to squeeze out all the water. We also had a wedge salad with homemade blue cheese dressing, which was the best part of the meal. It was all topped it off with apple dumplings with ice cream courtesy of Hannafords. They have an awesome appetizer and dessert frozen food section. LOL! Seeing how we stayed home I also made special things on New Years Day. We got this really good cinnamon bread from Wegman's over Christmas and I think I have a new found love for french toast - it was very good. For lunch we started out with skillet deep dish Mexican pizza - a Rachel Ray special and it also will have a couple tweeks the next time around. It was however quite tasty with a cornbread crust (gotta love Jiffy in this case!) and topped with taco meat, cheese, jalepeno's, tomato's and red peppers. Next time we will use canned jalepeno's and also olives - and will make the crust thinner and bigger by using a smaller pan. I also made chicken taquito's later in the day and after seeing the reviews decided it would be best to make use of my food chopper after it was all cooked and before I rolled up the flour tortilla's - that was the key. I also baked rather than fried them and they turned out pretty good - need a better dipping sauce next time. The ranch pepper dip was tasty in the meantime and much easier than what Rachel was proposing I whip up. I have my limits. And what did I learn... the Foodnetwork has lots of great recipes and you should read the reviews before attempting them and also practice before feeding to others outside your family. All in all a good experience.