What a great ending to a nice day!

Well, last night we made this AWESOME cheese sauce to go on ham steaks but there was a LOT extra. Not really anyone in this house complaining about that though. Jeremy mentioned last night that open face hamburgers sounded awesome. So, that meant making homemade bread, homemade hamburger patties and then just re-heating the cheese sauce (the easy part!). So today, amid the rainy, blah weather, I got everything ready to make a loaf of homemade bread tonight and then searched for a good hamburger recipe. I didn't want to just make a patty out of ground beef. While the kids cleaned their room, and the laundry was running ... I started the bread machine. Well, I should back up a bit ....



Yesterday my visiting teachers came over, actually one came over and the other was there in spirit (in the form of COOKIES!). Well, those cookies led to a craving today. It was like Pringles! You can't eat just one, or two in my case. So, I sat and thought today on how to satisfy my cookie craving and then it hit me. Ask my dear husband to bring me home a few bags of plain m&ms (if at all possible). He delivered!! (of course he brought me a few Lenny's subs, some bags of salt & vinegar chips, and a chocolate chip cookie to boot!!)

So! While my bread was cooking itself, the laundry was getting clean, the kids' rooms were being cleaned ... I started making m&m cookies ... with a new recipe. Not ALWAYS a good choice but in this case, it was an EXCELLENT choice. I got the recipe off of Allrecipes.com (one of my FAVORITE recipe websites) and here is the link Robbi's M&M Cookies Recipe. They are so excellent, however, I am not a candy on top person so I just put 1 c of m&m's into the mix and omitted putting m&ms on top. This is personal preference and nothing else! No other alterations were made to the recipe. Then I was off to make the hamburger patties. Now, my husband works with another person right now while on light duty. This person is getting into the rub business and wow does he have a winner. So excuse me while I plug it for him. You can get them in Kroger right now but he is working on getting it into Hen House & Price Chopper as well, maybe even HyVee. The brand is called Beorken. This is a local group based out of Grain Valley, MO. I LOVE locals! They are talking about changing the labels but this is what our bottle looks like and we are told that it will run about $5 for a bottle this size. Not bad at all!!

The rub is one that gets spicier as you add more so I only put in just over 1 TBS into my hamburger patty mixture to season it. The dinner was SUCH a success that our kids begged for seconds, something that even Jeremy and I couldn't do! I am already sure Peanut is going through a growth spurt but I would like to just tell myself that the dinner was just THAT good. Of course, it was finished with a fresh m&m cookie! What a great end to the day!