meal plan monday: feb 13.

this past week was kind of a break from this whole 'meal-planning' thing that i've been doing. i just could not wrap my head around planning anything ahead of time, or motivate myself to make anything that required real cooking. i didnt even make a real shopping list. the hubs finally decided on Tuesday that we no longer had enough real food in the house, so he made his own mental list and just shopped for the basics to get us through the week. he's great.

PS have i mentioned that Mark has been doing ALL of our grocery shopping this year? as in i have not done any grocery shopping since december? it's awesome. usually i make him a list, and he stops at the store on his way home on Monday night. but he has other things planned for tonight, so i'll probably have to be the one doing tonight's grocery run.

so i'm back this week, with a list of (admittedly simple) meals, one of which is new, all of which should be tasty, and some of which might (hopefully) be (not the exact opposite of) healthy(ish).

Monday: soup from a can.
Tuesday: uber romantic grilled chicken salad with fries.
Wednesday: 'Explosive' Chicken Casserole with a veggie.
Thursday: pasta with jar sauce and a side salad.
Friday: shrimp scampi with rice and a veggie.
Saturday: burgers and fries.
Sunday: breakfast for lunch.

i hope you all have a wonderful week!

project preview.

just a sneak peek of what i'm going to be keeping busy with this weekend:

hopefully i'll be ready when my sister brings her sewing machine to visit in a few weeks!

cooking with men.

this post is brought to you by the man with whom i am blessed to share a kitchen.

Episode 2: Manly, Efficient Chocolate Milk 
(can making chocolate milk technically be called cooking?)

Prepwork: the key to this recipe is having a mostly-empty bottle of chocolate syrup. Mark prefers Hershey's Special Dark Chocolate variety. tips for emptying a bottle include but are not limited to: eating lots of ice cream sundaes, making chocolate milk the lame way (in a glass with a spoon), and just eating the syrup straight out of the container.

Step 1: remove cap from chocolate syrup container.

Step 2: add milk. amount may vary based on amount of syrup left in container.

Step 3: replace cap onto chocolate syrup container (this step is key)

Step 4: shake shake shake.

Step 5: (optional) get annoyed that wife makes you do everything twice in order to try and get a good picture. consider getting wife a new, nicer camera.

Step 6: allow container to 'rest' upside down for a minute or two ensure maximum syrup inclusion.

Step 7: enjoy!

Note: this method is manly because it is efficient. it is efficient because 1) it requires no extra dishes and B) it makes good use of every.last.drop. of chocolate syrup. and real men are efficient. obviously.

see the pilot episode here

because actually rear-ending him would not have ended well.

to the old man in the ugly green-gray volvo:

thank you so much for making yesterday's morning commute extra memorable.

you see, i have driven behind you on several mornings. we take allll the same back roads in the morning. in fact, i know your license plate number, and that you work right across the street from my office building. i know this all sounds kind of stalker-ish, but i promise you, i just have nothing better to do with my half-awake mind in the morning than take note of the few cars around me.

i know you in particular because i seem to get stuck behind you quite often. because you tend to drive a bit slower than i would prefer. when i have the absolute pleasure of meeting you on the roads, you tend to add several minutes onto my commute, which means that i have to endure several extra minutes before i can get to the office, with its deliciously free coffee. you see, i love my cup of free caffiene in the morning, and i don't always function well until i have it.

i guess you have noticed me too. my orange car isnt exactly inconspicuous. and i would just like to take a moment and thank you for acknowledging me yesterday morning. it really made my day.

because when you hit your brakes as i drove up behind you, just because you thought i was following you a little too closely because there wasn't a full three car lengths between us? that was super-cool. i can't think of anything i was hoping for more on my morning commute than almost getting into a car accident. and then when you raised a hand in frustration to your rearview mirror? that just poured on the awesomesauce. there's nothing i like more than getting blamed and punished for something i didn't do. you really know how to make a girl feel special.

and i really do hope that 'make a stranger cry on their way to work' was on your bucket list, because if so, i want you to know that you can just go ahead and cross that one off. unless it doesn't count because i had just heard a sad song on the radio. so if that is the case and you still need to make someone cry based solely on your actions without the aid of any outside circumstances, then i am so sorry that i was not able to help you this time. but please let me know if  you need any help with other things on your list like 'trip someone into traffic' or 'punch a woman in the ovaries' and especially ' administer cruel and unusual forms of torture.' that would be super-fun.

if in the future we are fortunate enough to commute to work together, i hope that i can make your day just as wonderful as you made mine yesterday. perhaps i might decide to drive 20 mph all the way to work, or cause you to veer off the road, or even manage to make you feel the need to call your mommy in tears. just to let you know that i do see you there, and i would really cherish having the opportunity to make your day.

with much sarcasm,
Mando.

not airing my dirty laundry.

i thought about taking a picture of my stacked-sky-high-and-overflowing laundry hamper this weekend to share with you all, to really emphasize just how eggregious was my neglect of any and all household chores over the past few days. but then i carried it all downstairs on Sunday afternoon, sorted it, and started a load of towels instead. because its one thing to tell you all that i had a monster pile of laundry on my hands here, and quite another to take an actual picture of my dirty underwear and voluntarily post it on the interwebs for anyone and everyone to see. my oversharing does have its limits apparently. you're welcome.

but surprisingly, there is an actual reason for me to even be telling you about my dirty laundry, and it has to do with my new-ish personal determination to not take my life too seriously. i am trying really really hard to not let the little stuff, combined with the wierd funk that generally comes around this time of year, get to me and bring me down. so instead of stressing about unwashed dishes, our current standstill on house-related projects, and yes even dirty laundry this weekend, i decided to embrace (and kind of ignore) some of the crazyness that is my life right now.

we made spur-of-the-moment plans with some friends of ours for friday evening. the plans included stuffing ourselves silly with italian food and cake. and spending a couple hours proving what awesome bowlers we are...

...and then playing board games and just hanging out until the wee hours of the morning.

this was shortly before we doomed the game by making a complete loop

because we had stayed up so late the night before (seriously we are old fogeys who normally have a 10pm bedtime) we slept in until 11:30 on saturday. the only reason i got out of bed at all was that i had plans to meet a few of my neighbors and spend an afternoon with them being all crafty at a rubber-stamping card-making party. it was a lot of fun and i realized that there are some really neat people who live in my neighborhood and i should probably make more of an effort to meet them.

i got home just in time to turn around again to go back out to dinner to spend time stuffing our faces with more good food and cake with a new couple. well, Mark already knew half of the couple through work, but they were a new couple to me! and if i can just go ahead and speak for everyone, i would have to say that a great time was had by all! i hope we will be seeing more of M and B in the future.

on sunday afternoon all i wanted was a nap. but since Mark declared that there would be no naps because then we wouldn't be able to sleep at night, i spent my time gettin my craft on. i'm working on two projects for Mark for Valentine's day, and even though i'm not entirely sure that he'll really like them, i know i will! i finished one of them, and i would share it with you, but since i dubbed it a "secret project" i'll have to wait til after V-day to show it to you since he has been known to keep tabs on the blog.

and then there was that whole Super Bowl thing. after that first quarter safety, (ha! still makes me giggle) the rest was kind of meh in my opinion. i actually fell asleep for pretty much all of the 4th quarter. maybe if i would have had an afternoon nap, i could have stayed up for the whole game... but i did manage to open my eyes right at the end for the sweet sweet sight of Tom Brady's defeat at the hands of Eli Manning. again. it was kind of beautiful.

so all that to say "hey, i had a good weekend!"

how was yours?

meal plan monday: epic fail.

i'm starting to think that maybe i should switch up this whole meal-planning thing a little bit. because here it is, Monday afternoon, almost dinner time really, and all i have planned for this week is the leftover meals that we didnt make last week because we ate out all weekend. i'm thinking i have a few options as to where to go from here. 1. i give up on this whole meal planning thing. it requires way too much foresight and thinking and planning. 2. meal plan monday moves to tuesday (or any other day) so that i can use monday evenings to plan meals. 3. just buck up and stop being so lazy on the weekends and actually make a meal plan for the week before Monday morning rolls along.

i've got nothin this week. wait, is there anything less than nothing?

To Eat:
Monday: quesadillas. corn?
Tuesday: lasagna. salad.
Wednesday - Sunday: open to suggestions. really easy suggestions.

To Do:
use my new scissors to start cutting up tshirts for quilting.

it could be worse. right?

meal plan monday: wednesday edition.

or: flash-boiling is not quite what it sounds like.
or: i peeled an acorn squash and lived to tell about it.

since i have been doing this weekly meal-planning thing, not only have mealtimes and grocery shopping gotten less stressful, (because since i have a plan i can just make a list and send the hubs shopping!) but several people have sent me recipes for new things to try. i love this. keep 'em coming.

my friend Dana sent me this recipe for squash stew, and it seemed like a winner. the ingredient list wasn't three miles long, i had heard of almost everything on the ingredient list, and it seemed like it would be a do-able crockpot meal. score! well, except for that i didn't read the part of the recipe that said that my tomatoes should be peeled, seeded, and diced, and i kind of forgot the part where she mentioned that she used canned tomatoes for hers, so yeah. easy cooking fail.

although, now i get to share with you the nifty little trick that my sister taught me: how to peel tomatoes.

1. gather your supplies. you will need some tomatoes, a knife, a pot of water, a long handled spoon, and a bowl of ice. and possibly an extra bowl to put your peels in, in case your garbage can has been commandeered for squash-peeling purposes.

2. score an X into each of your tomatoes. just deep enough to break the skin, but not so deep that you actually cut into the tomato.

3. boil your pot of water.

4. put your tomatoes into the water. i did mine one at a time so they could be completely submerged in my little pot. also, so that i could watch them more closely.

5. leave them in the water until you see the edges of your X begin to get loose. this will not take very long at all. a few seconds should do it.

6. scoop your tomato out of the water and into the bowl of ice. roll it around a little if  you want, to make sure the whole tomato gets cooled down. this keeps it from becoming a boiled tomato.

7. peel your tomato. this part is kind of fun and awesome. sorry i have no pictures of it - both my hands were busy being covered in tomato-y awesomesauce.

congratulations! you now know how to flash-boil and peel a tomato! now all thats left to do is to smoosh all the seeds out and cut your tomatoes into little bits. or, you know, just skip all that mess and use canned tomatoes like a sane person.

the other fun part of this recipe involved peeling and cutting up an acorn squash. the hubs got this started for me while i was busy flash-boiling. according to the commentors on the recipe, a helpful hint is to cut the squash in half and then microwave it for a few minutes to soften the squash and make it easier to cut and peel. this seemed reasonable, but we only nuked ours for one minute, because i knew it was going to be cooking for a long time in the crock pot and i didnt want to risk over-cooking it in the microwave first.

you'll want to nuke yours for more than one minute, if you value your fingers and/or sanity.

the hubs managed to peel a few sections of it, but quickly got frustrated so we traded jobs and he took over tomato-seed-smooshing and dicing while i took a stab a the squash. it smelled just like a pumpkin and was kind of reminiscent of my adventures in rutabaga-peeling in that when i finished i was mostly just happy to have retained all of my fingers.

other than those two time-consuming tasks, every other part of this recipe was super simple, and we were able to just throw all the parts into the crock-pot, which worked great for us since it could stay in the fridge overnight and then cook while we were at work the next day.

it looked delicious. it smelled delicious. it tasted... alright. we're not the biggest fans. but we ate it. for dinner Friday, and dinner Monday, and lunch Tuesday. i probably won't make it again any time soon, but i'm glad it tried it. if nothing else, it was a great adventure.

ok, ok. i know this is already pushing limits on being the longest post about boring things like stew that people are actually willing to read, but just a quick note about spices: USE LESS CINNAMON. the flavor was absolutely overpowering and the scent combination of pumpkin and cinnamon made it hard for my brain and tongue to register that this was not nearly as sweet as my nose would have it believe. also, the hubs is not a cinnamon fan in general. wierd, i know. (also, i used about half of the suggested chili powder. 2Tbsp is a lot!)(also also, this recipe makes A LOT and doesnt re-heat particularly well. i mean it still tastes the same, but it takes quite a dive in the looks department.)

so there you have it folks, another successfully meal-planned week. thats an entire month that i have stuck with this. amazing. so here's what we've got planned for this week:

Monday: leftover squash stew.
Tuesday: boboli. and maybe french fries. (cuz potatoes are totes vegetables)
Wednesday: crock-pot chicken parmesan.
Thursday: soup from a can.
Friday: shrimp/pasta alfredo with broccoli
Saturday: quesadillas and/or lasagna.
Sunday: superbowl gluttony goodness.