full. just, full.

our fourth of july long weekend has been full of so much good food, it's hard to imagine that we have one more night to go!

i wanted to share a few recipes that i made last night and tonight, that i highly recommend trying.

first is roseanne cash's potato salad. i made this for a bbq we attended last night at one of dan's coworkers houses. we had a BLAST! a few things i did differently from the original recipe, was that i left out the eggs, and used more like 1/2 cup mayo, 1/2 cup dijon mustard, and a few generous squeezes of yellow mustard. it was INSANE, it was so good. i highly recommend using fresh dill. it made all the difference.

second, is smoky baked beans, also from the smitten kitchen website. the original recipe calls for chipolte chilies, which i left out, thus my title also had the 'hot' part left out. i also omitted the bacon, and we used shiner because we didn't have any dark beer on hand-aaaand we might have used more beer than the recipe called for. ha! i also added about 1/4 cup of light brown sugar. these beans were AWESOME! i give dan-o the credit for these because he pretty much put the whole thing together!

lastly, we tried smitten kitchen's cherry pie with almond crumble. YUM! it calls for sour cherries, which we could not find--we actually used two pounds of frozen sweet organic, and it made for a really tasty treat. we also blind-baked our crust, in case you were wondering.

in addition to these three great dishes, we had fresh, local sweet corn on the cob and free range bbq chicken. we did about six breasts in the crock pot for six hours with a mixture that consisted of about a cup of chopped red onion, two chicken-flavored bouillon cubes, soy sauce, molasses, bbq sauce, hot mustard, and worcestershire. totally rad.

isn't it cool how God made all these amazing foods? He is so creative! we loved serving our first real dinner, after moving, to friends and family. tonight was a gift.

it is also a gift, that the dishes are clean, put away and i'm in bed blogging about this before 9pm! HA! we've had some late nights. 

hope you are all having a great weekend!