Six-Seven-Eight: The Chronicle of a Liberal Couple's Culinary Adventures: The Great Dinner Retrospective

With our last dinner retrospective we went over a lot of quick, easy, and economical meals, so this time around we'll be delving into more elaborate and fun dinners we've made over the course of the past year.

To start off, here's one of the many quiche variations we've tried out. This is a meal that's easy to customize and make in many different styles just by swapping out the type of cheese and the filling. Swiss and cheddar are are great options, but you can use just about anything. For stuffing we generally use broccoli and some other veggies, in this case red pepper and green onion. If you want to go for a more breakfast oriented approach you could instead use bacon and sausage. If you want to cut out the meat or lower the fat content, this is also good with egg beaters and soy bacon.

Here's the finished product after the egg mixture has been poured into the shell with the veggies and baked until just firm enough to cut into slices and stand up on a plate.

This next chicken based meal is something we like to call the "restaurant replacement," because at the end you feel like you had something as good or better than what a nice restaurant would make. The sauce is what makes this dinner so spectacular, deliciously mixing together a cream base with basil, pimentos, and several other spices.

This next one looks a little odd, but is as amazing as it is messy! A local barbecue place sets up a booth every year at our state fair, and they sell a concoction dubbed the "cowboy cocktail," which consists of alternating layers of barbecue meat, beans, and potato salad or coleslaw. We cooked up beef in the slow cooker with spices and beef broth and then shredded it apart for our take on the "barbecued" meat for our version.

Here's another take on the same idea, but done as a burger instead of a stand alone "cocktail."

One meal we really love doing is home made pizza night, were we put together whatever ingredients strike our fancy at the time for the perfect pie. We have a few signature pizzas we've perfected over time, including a hamburger pizza (not pictured in this blog) that uses mustard, hamburger meat, and pickles. This pizza below is our buffallo chicken pizza, which uses a base of bleu cheese dressing and chunks of chicken coated in buffalo wing sauce. Below is the first layer of this wonderful blend of spicy and cool.

After putting on the sauce and chicken, everything gets topped with a thick layer of mozzarella cheese.

Here it is pulled right out of the oven, piping hot on the pizza stone and baked to a golden perfection.

For our last meal in this edition of the great dinner retrospective we'll go over my birthday dinner from last year. On special dinner occasions at home we like to mimic a meal we had at Red Lobster once, consisting of steak, lobster, mashed potatoes, and asparagus. Megan isn't a seafood fan, so she skips out on the lobster. Here are the little delicious crustaceans cut down the middle and with a small layer of meat removed, which will be used later for a topping on the mashed potatoes.

After removing part of the shell and cutting them open, the lobsters get covered in melted butter and garlic prior to broiling.

One of my gifts that year was a couple of a different dip packets from a nice kitchen supply store we have here, so we mixed them together and dug in with bagel crisps and pita chips while waiting on the meal to finish cooking.

Asparagus can go from bland to spectacular if cooked right. For this dinner we cooked it in both butter and oil and used a roasted red pepper seasoning.

And finally we reach the end and are ready to dig in! The asparagus tops the steak, and a combination of shrimp and lobster meat tops the mashed potatoes.