Snuggling Into My *Organized* Nest

I get a serious high every time I walk into my old office and see how clean and organized it all is... over the last few days I've been just wandering in and turning on the lights for no reason.  Hubs is tolerating this little burst of crazy with surprising good humor, considering how loudly I squeal every time and how I make him oooh and ahhh with me if he's nearby.

All of the cleaning and organizing we've been up to has inspired me to try to be organized in other parts of our lives lately.  I've finally finished Little Man's medical binder after oh... about four years of thinking about having one.  It is a 3 inch binder completely filled with information on every doctor's visit, therapy session, medical bill, and referral we've had over the last nearly five years.  Ideally I think I want to streamline it a little more and get rid of some of the older reports that are less important to be dragging from place to place, but for now it is done and going to be a huge help in scheduling and keeping track of what needs to happen and when.

I've also been being much better about our menu-planning and grocery shopping.  Every Tuesday night for the last month I've been sitting down (with Hubs if he's around) and cross-checking coupons and sales at our local grocery store.  Then with those in mind, I make a weekly meal plan and shop accordingly on Wednesday afternoon when all the sales start.  With our switch to more clean-eating and less processed food, we'd been slacking a lot with our couponing and we'd seen a rise in our monthly grocery spending.  Now that I'm taking the time to plan and do some basic couponing the night before each trip, we've managed to get our weekly bill down to the same amount of spending we'd been doing when we couponed, plus we're eating much healthier and I'd say about 80% clean.

Between all that and managing to get several of Little Man's major appointments scheduled and/or completed, I've been feeling like a champ lately.  I'm trying to savor this flood of energy while I have it, because I know myself and I know how easily I fall into a lazy rut if I let myself.  Plus, I vaguely remember being a complete couch-potato during my third trimester last pregnancy, and I'm not sure how much of that was laziness or necessity.  Back to work!!

Still in the pre-pregnancy jeans.  Gotta love "super-low rise" pants!

 

The One With Deadlines, and a Recipe!

I have a lot of posts swirling around my head.  If you could see my page of drafts, you'd see a lot of half-assed  half-written ideas swirling around that I haven't finished.  It's just been an insanely busy week.  One of my best friends is getting married this weekend, and I'm in her wedding.  She has not asked us to do a single thing other than enjoy the day (thanks gorgeous!), and yet somehow I'm still running around like a crazy person trying to cram five days worth of To-Dos into four.

So tomorrow afternoon Hubs and I head out of here bright and early so I can get my mani pedi for the big day, and then we're staying in the city all weekend.  Little Man gets to go to his dad's for possibly the last time til our wedding in November, because I am at the end of my rope with the Ex. 

Hubs and I have been driving Little Man to the Ex every other weekend, which is a three to four hour round trip for us.  We've been trying to find excuses to make the trip worthwhile, like going to the mall or hanging out with my mother who lives halfway between the two points.  And we've been able to schedule a lot of fun adult activities to keep us needing and wanting him to spend time with the Ex.  But we're tapped out.  Ex has indicated that for various excuses reasons he will not be able to make the trip to us in the foreseeable future, so that's that.  I never want to keep Little Man from spending time with Ex, because he adores him and vice versa... but at some point I need this to be an equal partnership.  Gah.  Frustration. 

Anyways, since this week has been so busy most of our meals have been tossed together in a rush.  On Tuesday I went to Marshalls and found an amazing selection of kitchen spices and sea salts, so when I came home I threw together this spaghetti dish that is one of our standard "Hurry Up I'm Hungry" meals.  Hubs raved, I gave it four out of five stars.  I'm not sure it is as good as Honey Boo Boo child's mom's spaghetti (oh god, look it up, its so gross) but it's a start:

Please note, I'm writing it how I cook it, so don't be alarmed.  Your fridge may look different than mine, in which case feel free to substitute your own wilty veggies.

Spaghetti-ish 
-1 onion, diced
-1 smushed from the crisper drawer red pepper, diced
-1 orange pepper, diced
-1/2 slightly shriveled and dry container of white button mushrooms, chopped
-1 can of tomato sauce
-1 can of diced tomatoes
-Olive oil
-Everything left in the bottom of the chopped garlic container, maybe 3 tsp or so
-1/4 cup of Cabernet, from the box in the fridge
-Italian seasoning
-Sugar
-Black lava sea salt from Marshalls that you absolutely are dying to use
-Black pepper
-1 pkg of homemade basil pasta, also from Marshalls

• Have your Hubs chop and dice all the veggies while you are out shopping for shoes for the wedding.  Realize you want to spend hours at the store stocking up on spices you don't need and will never use, but sound delicious and amazing.  Then when you get home, your mise en place is done and waiting in the fridge.  BOOM take that Ann Burrell.
• Hubs has decided not to chop up the mushrooms because they look funny.  Decide that mushrooms are a fungus so they probably can't get worse.  Chop 'em up.
• Add olive oil and all the veggies to a big pan.  Let them get soft while you show Hubs how much you spent on shoes and spices.  Appease him by showing him the pair of pants you got him.  Stir veggies, change into pajamas at 5:45 PM.
• Pour a glass of wine for yourself.  Splash some into the pan first because cooks always use wine, right?  Add the cans of diced tomatoes and sauce.  Stir.
• Realize you need to boil water for the pasta.  Get on it.
• Add a couple shakes of Italian seasoning to the sauce on the stove.  Use the precise measurement of "til it looks like there is seasoning all over the top of the sauce."  Stir it in.  Add a lot of pepper, and then your black lava sea salt (yay a reason to use it!).  Taste and add more of whatever it is missing, plus a tsp of sugar.
• Add the noodles to the boiling water.  Cook til they are al dente.  Hubs is confused as to why you want to eat noodles with no sauce, he's more of a "It said 6 minutes on the box so that is when they are done" type guy.  PS: The box said 2-3 minutes but it took 8 to make them not crunchy, so I won that battle.
• Stir the pasta sauce til the noodles are done.  Have Hubs drain the noodles and then add them to the sauce pan.  He thinks this is a bad idea, but you convince him it is brilliant and saves a bowl to wash.
• Serve to all adults and eat.  Nuke 4 nuggets for the child.  If he's anything like mine, he'll be much happier that way.

I will completely understand if you try and recreate this recipe and it falls short.  It is clearly a complicated and difficult dish to master. I'd have taken a picture, but I was stuffing my face instead. 

Bon' Appetit!

The One With The Kidney Bread

My house smells Ah-mazing. 

I tried out this recipe for Crusty Bread from the Simply So Good blog link I found on Pinterest. 

Of course I decided to try this recipe and then realized I needed to buy yeast, and that I didn't own a pot big enough for the recipe... yada yada.

All the comments were positive. 
"Its so quick and easy!"
"It took me absolutely no time."
"This is the best bread I've EVER EATEN!"

So I was really stoked.

Supposedly, according to the blog, it ends up looking like this:

Not my bread, not by a long shot.  This is also not my picture, it is SimplySoGood's picture of her simple easy bread that she just magicked out of the oven.

 

 

And my house... Let me tell you.  It smells so good.  I decided to go all in with this and make a cinnamon raisin loaf, since Hubs is really salty that I did not let him  recommend him buying the raisin bread in the store this week since it is most definitely not part of the eating-clean plan. 

 

So I'm all happy.  I mean, look how nice that looks?  Can you envision the looks of envy I'd get from my Instagram/Facebook friends when they see how nice of a loaf of bread I can bake?  The comments?  The applause?!!!

 

Okay.  Ignoring the fact that I can't edit photos, and that obviously there is no natural lighting at 11:10 PM... My bread looks like a kidney.

 

 

 

Maybe it tastes amazing.  But it looks ridiculous.  There is no way I'm bragging about this one.

 

Edit:  Upon further reflection (and a chunk sawed off the heel of the bread) it has been decided that it tastes OK.  I think the raisins might have been kind of old, so they aren't very squishy or juicy.   But the crust is super crunchy, and the texture inside is nice.  I give it 4 out of 5 stars.   I'll just eat it with my eyes closed.



The One About Eating Clean

I read a TON of blogs.  Its a slightly unhealthy addiction.  But I started with one... who lead to another... and another... and I can't part with any of them! 

So through the blog chain (and Pinterest, damn Pinterest) I have found a lot of information lately about "clean eating."  And it has really struck a cord with me.  Yesterday I called Hubs at work and told him when he came home there would be no more Cheezits or junk food in the pantry.  We were taking a 10 day pledge to eat non-processed, healthy and natural foods.   He made me promise to save the ice cream for after the 10 days were up, but otherwise didn't protest.

Of course, we will be making room for a couple cheats and mods in our plan.  We will be drinking, because that is not really optional with our family.  We have two wine and beer festivals in the next two weeks alone!  We also have been using coffee creamer, but agreed tonight we would try to move towards milk-only during the next day or so when that runs out.  But other than that... we're doing great!  1.5 days in and we're not dying.  We're making smart decisions and going to be healthy dammit! 

Clean grocery trip!  Only $95 and I managed to stock up for the week!



Today's trip to the grocery store felt awesome.  I didn't buy anything junk (except the juice, which is for LM).   They are all foods we like anyways, we just need more of them in our lives, so that part isn't hard.  The hard part will be making sure that we don't get lazy and fall back onto convenience foods.  I should also try to forget that Papa John's owes us a free pizza. 

Tonight's dinner was a great start!  Homemade sausage sauteed with pepper, spinach and onion, served over spaghetti squash.  Yum!!  I made a berry sauce over Greek yogurt for dessert... that was not quite a hit with Hubs.  He grimaced through an entire (very small) bowl, and he said it was the only thing I've ever served him that he didn't like.   He kept reminding me it was the yogurt, not my berry sauce recipe that he hated.  But it was cute to watch him try to enjoy it because he knows how important eating healthy is to me (right now, don't get too excited here.)

So there ya have it.  Wish us luck, and hopefully even after our ten-day junk food free pledge is over we can continue eating more clean foods and improve our overall health.  And if I lose a pound or ten... well that would be swell too!

I'll leave you with this photo of Little Man in the grocery store.  No less than seven people stopped to talk to me today and give me their two cents on everything from spaghetti sauce to parenting.  Sleeping babies are apparently a great conversation starter.

People were impressed that I considered his comfort by providing the dirty towel from the backseat of the car as a neck pillow. 

I don't think Little Man cares much about clean eating either way.



The One About Food Choices

My son loves to snack.  He avoids "regular" mealtimes by constant grazing.  That's cool, I'm down.  That is ideally how I like to eat too, but I have this creature called Hubs to feed and he likes dinner after work.  And then I eat with him, and then we have wine... and that's why I'm going to have a beer belly forever.  Oh well.

But Little Man has more fun up his sleeve than just not wanting to sit down for dinner.  His food has several LM approved requirements to be considered before tasting:

* It must be completely dry.  There are very few exceptions to the dry rule.  He will eat bananas, only if I hold it in the peel and he can take bites off it.  He will eat applesauce out of a squeeze pouch, but not off a spoon.  Although, counter to that rule is that he will eat the applesauce IF we pin him down, hold his head, and force him to try a bite.  Then he will take future bites ONLY during that meal.  Even if we take a break from applesauce til dinner, that process starts up again.  And yes, I've done it more than once out of desperation, because dammit I KNOW HE LOVES APPLESAUCE.  Other than that, if a food is wet and he touches it, it will immediately be tossed to his left.  Chicken nuggets?  Awesome.  Slightly soggy nugget that does not pass the dry test?  To the left.

* To further clarify the spoon rule, nothing from a spoon will go into his mouth without a full body hold.  Soup?  HAH.  Ice cream?  NOPE.  Won't even open his mouth.  I've decided nothing on a spoon is worth that much effort.

*If it is bigger than a Cheerio, attempts will be made to crumble it no matter what it is.  Frosted Mini Wheats become Shredded Wheat.  Fig Newtons become fig jam and mush.   Bread is peeled apart into smaller and smaller crumbs until it looks like we're feeding ducks in the living room. 

*Protein is in the form of nuggets (chicken, very rarely fish), peanut butter, grilled cheese in tortillas or bread.  That is it.  See the above rules.  Also, sneaking meat into a grilled cheese sandwich or tortilla is not allowed, he will pull apart the pieces during Step 3 (crumbling) and you will be discovered.

*Fruit snacks are the ultimate favorite food.  They trump all other treats.  He does not discriminate brand, size, shape, or level of staleness. 

*If you manage to get something in his mouth somehow, but it does not follow one of the rules listed above (say, a little ball of rice you've disguised as a bread ball), he will stick out his tongue, and scrape it off.   That is embarrassing in say... a nice Japanese restaurant.  :)

To sum up, Little Man eats:

-Breads
-Cereals
-Fruit snacks
-Nuggets (specifically the kind from Costco in the huge bag)
-Grilled cheese/cheese tortillas
- Food from a squeeze pouch
-Cookies/crackers/chips/granola bars
-Banana


And that's it.  All day, every day.  I buy healthy granola bars, whole grain breads, and try to give him lots of "better" cereals and crackers.  Lately there has been a huge increase in the amount of baby foods that come in pouches, which has been nice (although they are insanely pricey for so little food.)

He drives me batty.  I love to cook.  I would feed him amazing gourmet meals if I could.  Dammit I would love to just give him grapes and a hot dog!!!  (Cut up into safe pieces ya worrywarts).  But I tried making homemade nuggets for him and they did not pass Rule #1, so they went to the dog.

So when I'm out with you and I complain that Little Man doesn't eat anything, or you see me feeding him two bread rolls at a restaurant and calling it dinner... Just know I'm trying.  I swear, I'm trying.

The One Where I Cook

Hurray!  We're back to normal this week now that Little Man has come home.   We started off the week with steamcleaning the carpets (our yellow lab Sandy has a sensitive stomach and I let Little Man drink juice in sippies that he carries everywhere) and an experiment with a recipe from Food Network magazine.

I love cooking.  But if you'd asked me five years ago what my favorite hobby was, cooking would never even have made the top twenty.  When I first showed up to college, my best friend had to teach me how to peel and dice an onion.  I burned grilled cheese.  It was terrible.  There was an entire year where I ate nothing but Stouffers mac n' cheese meals and pickles for lunch.  Alright you got me, it was almost two years.  And then for dinner it was Taco Bell.  It was awesome.

Some time after college graduation and my marriage to Ex I got interested in food.  I had decided I wanted to be a good housewife... and I looked up recipes I could make in the crockpot as a starting point.  Of course then I started working in the restaurant and cooking was the last thing I wanted to do, so that never really happened the way I wanted it to. 

But working there did teach me how to use a knife and how to feel more confident in the kitchen.  As a manager I was forced to make my own lunches every day with just the ingredients available in the restaurant.  After a few months of being laughed at by my kitchen staff for having pathetic skills in the kitchen (a LOT of microwave quesadillas), you can bet I was going to work hard to find recipes I could make quickly and easily.

Then after my divorce from Ex, I finally got my own place and my cooking obsession took off.  I would constantly read recipes online and try them on my friends and family.  The little crockpot meals I made evolved into some serious stovetop cooking and today I feel pretty comfortable in all aspects of the kitchen.  I even have a couple dishes that I get requests for from Hubs and the fam over and over again!

Last night was my first venture into using the broiler, and since it worked and nothing exploded or burned, I'm super excited to try all the recipes I've been putting off for fear of failure.  If you get the Food Network magazine, the recipe I tried was the polenta and sausage skillet meal and it was pretty good!  It makes me feel like a real cook when I can take a recipe and note that there are a few things I would change to make it perfect for our family - we like hot sauce, maybe too much - and then when I tweak it it becomes a family favorite.

Well there goes the laundry buzzer.  I have about 4 more loads til I'm caught up again and then can get to work on the rest of the disaster area... err... house.   Its good to be back!