Back in November I wrote about BacoBurger — a company that packages and sells burgers that are made from a blend of ground bacon and meat. Now, if there’s one thing I love more than burgers it’s breakfast, so seeing as how I had a few burger patties left after my original blog post I decided to try making a breakfast BacoBurger.

Instead of a bun I opted to use two waffles. Since my waffle maker only makes square waffles though a regular round burger patty just wasn’t going to cut it, so I decided to try cooking my BacoBurger patty right in my waffle iron as well. The burger didn’t exactly turn into the perfect rectangular shape I was hoping for, but it was certainly close enough.

Another plus of cooking my BacoBurger patty right in my waffle iron was that the little pockets it created were perfect for drizzling a small amount of syrup onto my finished burger. As a final step I topped my breakfast BacoBurger with a sunny side up egg.

Overall my sandwich was pretty good. It sort of reminded me of the McGriddles that you can get at McDonald’s, except for the fact that BacoBurger patties are 100 times better tasting than the sausage at McDonald’s.

I received an email recently offering me $350 to construct and write about a “snackadium.” A snackadium, for those of you who are unaware just like I was, is basically a stadium built out of snacks. Seeing as how $350 is about what I make working two days at my normal job I’d have to be pretty stupid to pass this up. Plus, who wouldn’t wanna make a stadium out of snacks!? Since the promotion was sponsored by Pillsbury there was one stipulation — that I incorporate their crescent rolls and pizza crust into my creation. Not a bad deal at all!

The first thing I did when planning my snackadium was to check out Google for some inspiration. Pretty much every other snack stadium I found used guacamole for the field, so I decided to take a different approach with mine and make it out of a Pillsbury cake instead. I didn’t make just any cake though, I made one stuffed with crushed up Pillsbury chocolate chip cookies! As much as I wish I could take credit for the cookies inside the cake idea it was actually suggested right on the back of the box of cake mix. Good call Pillsbury!

Once my cake was out of the oven I added some food coloring to a tub of butter cream frosting to make it nice and green and then finished up the field with white fondant stripes. The goalposts on my field were made out of pretzels that I held together with chocolate before covering them in white frosting. It’s funny how small the cake looks when surrounded by all the other snacks, but in reality it was actually pretty decently sized.

Now that the centerpiece to my snackadium was complete I started work on the tiers around it by cutting up cardboard, folding it into shelves and wrapping it in tinfoil. After that I lined the shelves with various snacks including meatballs, chicken wings, chips, spinach, turkey and cheese roll-ups made with Pillsbury crescent rolls, pigs in a blanket made with Pillsbury pizza dough, cookies, muffins, cheese and sausage, pre-made sandwiches and a ton more.

For as much fun as I had building my snackadium, I think the best part was all the leftovers I had when it was done. The chicken wings, meatballs, roll-ups and pigs in a blanket were gone almost immediately, but everything else managed to last a good two or three days! I guess it probably would have been a good idea to plan the building of my snack stadium around having some friends over to watch football or something, but I actually liked having all of the leftovers for myself. Unfortunately this is also why I’ll probably weigh 500 pounds some day….

I have partnered with Pillsbury through DailyBuzz to help promote their Crescent Roll and Pizza Crust products. I have been compensated for my time commitment to work with this product. However, my opinions are entirely my own and I have not been paid to publish positive comments. Thank you Pillsbury for this awesome opportunity to create a Snackadium!

Everyone from my mom, to my friends to my wife is always telling me that I need to eat better. Apparently things like deep fried nacho cheese and bacon weave grilled cheese sandwiches aren’t considered part of a “healthy diet.” What about the Cobb salad cone that I created? That’s gotta count for something right?

Recently, HelloFresh — a company that specializes in healthy meals that you prepare yourself at home — offered to send me a few of their selections for free so I figured, “why not?” After all, I’m sure my body is OK with me skipping the bacon and setting my deep fryer aside for a few days.

The whole concept behind HelloFresh is pretty cool. They send you all the fresh ingredients — and instructions — that you need to make really great meals really, really easily. In fact, each meal only takes 30 minutes to prepare. Price wise, you could definitely get the same ingredients for much cheaper at your local grocery store, but it’s sort of nice having the exact amounts of everything you need delivered right to your door.

Out of the three meals that HelloFresh sent me — Chicken Paillard, Cardamom Spiked Shrimp Pilau and duck breasts — I’m not sure if I can even pick a favorite. They all tasted great. Seriously, I’m terrible at following directions and even I couldn’t manage to mess any of these up. The only real issue I ran into was that one of the recipes used both parsley and rosemary and since they look pretty similar I had no idea which was which, but a quick Google search solved that problem.

Aside from the ease of everything though do you know what’s perfect about HelloFresh? I made their duck breast with cranberry sauce and rice recipe for my wife and not only did she love it, but on top of that she probably assumed that I put tons of effort into planning the whole meal when all I really did was grab the package off our front porch and follow the directions that came along with it. She doesn’t read my blog too often, so I figure that I’ve probably got at least a couple more weeks of me being in her good graces before she sees this and finds out the truth.

Could I eat stuff like this every day? No way, I need things like big greasy burgers in my diet, but it was definitely a nice change of pace. Interested in trying HelloFresh yourself? Use coupon code “HF-dudefoods” at checkout and you’ll receive 30% off your first delivery!