Memorial Day Weekend & An Onion Ring Recipe

Oh the irony of life sometimes.  I had been waiting for this 3-day weekend to come for the longest time, and Friday night into Saturday I caught a cold.  It's been a fairly miserable-feeling weekend to say the least.  We did manage to cook a nice dinner at home Saturday night.  It's kind of our goal to try at least one new recipe a weekend.  In a recent Real Simple, there's a recipe for baked onion rings.

I'm not really a fan of ranch dressing, so I skipped that part of the recipe.  The rings are pretty seasoned, so we didn't even need a dipping sauce.  They came out great (and guilt-free!), and definitely a repeat recipe.  We paired them with filet medallions.   

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups panko bread crumbs
• 1/4 cup olive oil (I definitely used less than this, but you can use this as an estimate)
• kosher salt and black pepper
• 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
• 2 large eggs, lightly beaten
• 1 small sweet onion (such as Vidalia or Walla Walla), sliced and rings separated

Directions

1. Heat oven to 450° F. Toss the bread crumbs with 2 tablespoons of the oil, ½ teaspoon salt, and ¼ teaspoon pepper. Bake on a rimmed baking sheet, tossing once, until golden brown, 3 to 5 minutes. Transfer to a shallow bowl. Place the flour and eggs each in separate shallow bowls.
2. Rub the remaining oil on 2 rimmed baking sheets. Dip the onion rings in the flour and eggs (letting any excess drip off), then coat with the bread crumbs, pressing gently to help them adhere. Bake on the prepared baking sheets, turning once, until tender, 12 to 14 minutes. 

News Junkie

I feel super guilty that I've neglected this blog a bit.  I keep on intending to update, but something comes up and I just push it off.  I'll try to be better about it going forward...

On my mind right now - the devastation from the tornadoes in Oklahoma.  Hurricane Sandy was bad, but at least we had more than a 16-minute warning to get out of there to safety.  I can't even fathom what experiencing a tornado is like, and hope I never have to.  I wiki'd "tornado" to read up on them a bit, and learned that an area of the US is known as "Tornado Alley."  I had always known certain states were susceptible to tornadoes, but not this specifically.   

I am currently trying to figure out where to make our donation to help those in OK - do I go with the Red Cross, which I've donated to before, or try for a different organization?  I just want to make sure funds are going specifically to the cause that it's intended for.  Red Cross seems to be the go-to organization for this kind of disaster relief.

You know what - every little bit helps, and I can't help but admire when celebrities or sports figures of the sort, whose salaries are basically public, make a donation, in this case, Kevin Durant, of the Oklahoma City Thunder.  It's just great to see those types lend a helping hand and make such generous gestures.

I have to admit that I am a self-professed news junkie - I love to know what's going on in the world, even though unfortunately it's more often bad news than good.  I think for the most part it's beneficial to me, but at the same time, it can hurt because I feel myself worrying about the possibility of similar things happening in my own life.  And with Twitter, which I basically joined to constantly get news bits all the time, it's been so easy to keep up with everything, in almost real time.  I need to step back though, and try to get back to some of the other things I enjoy doing.