I figured I better sneak in a post about how we spend Independence Day before the entire month got away from us! We usually end up with quite a crowd around the pool on July 4th, but so many of our favorites were traveling, that it ended up being a very low key day. The kids all wore stars and stripes and we spend almost every second of our day swimming, eating and playing dominoes.
The forecast was a little iffy for the evening and we debated a picnic at Morgan Creek (like last year) right up until we left the driveway. The kids ultimately decided for dinner and dessert and we grabbed a quick red, white & blue photo op in the driveway before we left.
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We opted for a selfie since Ella was struggling to manage the big camera.
As usual, Ella’s favorite part is to snap a photo when you aren’t paying attention! I can’t tell you how many images of myself in mid sentence or reaching for the camera that she’s managed to capture.
It never did much more than sprinkle, so after dinner we DID ride out to the winery to catch the fireworks and, as usual, they were beautiful!! If you are local and haven’t tried the holiday celebration at Morgan Creek, I highly recommend it.
The only thing that didn’t go quite as planned was our meal that day. Josh thought it would be a great idea to cook meat and veggies in an aluminum foil packet on the grill while everyone else’s burgers and hot dogs were cooking. Fueled by our successful Memorial Day grill-fest, we were expecting nothing less than perfection.
Here is what we did:
That’s smoked gouda, by the way. DELICIOUS.
Why do we have no “after” picture, you ask? Well, we cooked these on the grill. Placed on the top rack, we were hoping to smoke them a bit and keep from over-cooking them since they weren’t on any direct heat. In reality, the chicken was more like charcoal when we removed them from the grill. It was either raw chicken or overcooked chicken. The veggies and cheese survived, but it wasn’t nearly as filling and topped with smoked gouda tasted way too “smoked”. I’m guessing this would have worked much better in the oven where they could’ve heated a little more evenly, so we’ll try these again.
Have you made pockets like this on the grill before? Any suggestions for our next attempt? Labor Day is coming fast and we’ve got to figure out something else fun to cook on the grill!
