Links and Thinks

Is the title too twee and/or dorky?

1. I've been making good headway on a few of my resolutions already. My 45th birthday (!!!!) is this March, and the day falls in the middle of the week. I had a few grandiose plans for celebrating but those usually end up getting scrapped. Instead I decided to give myself a gift I sorely need: I am taking the entire week off. A birthday staycation!

I am already counting down the days: 45 business days to go. Seriously.

2.  Also from the resolution front: I dropped off a couple of bags of food at the Food Pantry, added this Donate page to my bookmarks, did my monthly edits/purchases post, and got the 3 posts in last week.

3. I am also working on the budgeting. For years I used Quicken on Windows, and loved the program. It was linked to all my accounts, I could categorize all my purchases easily, and setting up budgets was a breeze. Switching to a Mac changed all that; Intuit refuses to make a good version of Quicken for the Mac, so I had to abandon my beloved program. I've been half-heartedly using Mint, but my Nordstrom account doesn't link to it, and after all this time, I just don't love the idea of doing all of my financial planning up in the clouds. I have online banking so it seems like a weird tic, but when I pull all my accounts together in one place with their account numbers, I just feel better if it is on my computer.

So I have been comparing programs and I am torn between two: iBank and Moneydance. Anyone have any experience with either? Thoughts?

4. I want to add Helen's dinner-table "aspiration" as an addendum to my own New Years resolutions; we have a great kitchen table, and we only use it with company. Not only is it a great way to truly slow down and appreciate our food (when I did Core we sat at the table all the time), but it is a way to spend more time together, take a breath between working and laying on the couch watching TV, and most of all, will eliminate most of the food stains on our clothes, laps, computers, and rug. ;-D

5. Lest you think all of this resolution business is a waste of time, a recent study showed that our personalities are changing all the time even though we think they are not. Science! (TM Jessie) It's never too late to change yourself.

6.



This is what I needed the plastic shoe boxes for. ;-D

Yes, those are all of my frozen bagged foods. I made tomato sauce and a batch of Sheila's green pasta sauce, and froze them flat on a cookie sheet.



Then I stacked them in the plastic boxes, alongside another container of soups. They had been scattered throughout the freezer, and I realized we weren't eating them as much as we should. This should help with that.



That's chicken noodle, smoky black bean, Tuscan bean, and butternut squash-carrot soup on the right. My friend Amanda created another recipe for a savory parmesan-nutmeg muffin that I am going to try, and I think we will be making quick work of some of these soups this week. (I will post the muffin recipe once I have tried them out!)

P.S. I stole the shoebox idea from Kat at Corporette, from a post from many moons ago. The frozen baggies idea I incorporated immediately, but I waited on the shoe box until now. It felt way too anal-retentive organized, but...that's what I am! Might as well make it work for us. :)

7. Meal planning frequently falls apart for me when I try to do it over the course of a week, and sometimes (like this one) even Sunday Cooking doesn't get done. I think sometimes I am just too ambitious; I buy all the ingredients but for whatever reason I just don't feel like doing the work, and the food goes bad and we order pizza instead.

So when my friend A linked this cooking challenge, it was a light bulb moment. OH! Not every meal is made for the same reasons, or with the same amount of effort -- and even comfort non-cooking foods have their place in meal planning!

I can use my own lists of known classics and my Pinterest board for new ideas, but this categorization from that post is one I want to use over and over:

• Classic Weeknight – Exactly what it sounds like. Quick, simple, healthy, meals that require minimal effort when you are charged with getting dinner on the table fast.
• Make-Ahead – Some of these would also fall under “Classic Weeknight,” but the beauty of them is that you can do a large chunk of the work on the weekend and store in the freezer.
• Keep the Spark Alive – These are a little more involved than regular weeknight dinners, but they are every bit as crucial to your psychological health because they take time and love and have the potential to get you excited about cooking again.
• Security Blankets – These are not recipes, per se, but suggestions for finger-foody things (peanut butter, hummus, baby carrots) that don’t need to be cooked.

The challenge is that you look at your calendar for the week, and see which nights should be Security Blankets or Make Aheads, which are ones that you have time to try new things (Keep Spark Alive), when you can prepare Make Aheads or just Classic Weeknights. You are supposed to pick a couple from each, and Security Blankets for the rest of the days.

I LOVE THIS IDEA. I can tweak it for us so easily, to ensure we definitely do more home cooking, with a reasonable mix of new, favorites, easy, hard and pre-made, or just a happy PB&J or baked potato.

8. Doesn't this sandwich look amazing? I don't know why it never occurred to me that we could make reubens at home. We can make reubens at home, OMG. And it can be a healthier version too: turkey pastrami, good sauerkraut and rye bread, a light Thousand Island...my husband is going to love this one. Oh my yes.

9. Did everyone see Ally's trick for wearing collared shirts under crewneck sweaters? She doesn't button the shirt underneath except for the top and bottom buttons, and tucks the rest to the sides. As I commented on her blog: Woman, you are a genius.

10. Is it time for my birthday staycation yet?

Thanksgiving shopping

I love Thanksgiving grocery shopping. Almost as much as I love cooking Thanksgiving dinner!



It was a lovely November Saturday, kind of brisk but sunny out. In my closet review, I pulled out a grey knit Old Navy vest from a few years ago, added a lighter grey Loft long-sleeved tee, a cotton black-and-ivory scarf, my Gap long and leans, and my silver Privos. When it got warmer out, I removed the scarf, but it all still worked fine.



Onto the shopping!

My first stop was Target, where I picked up general staples and brand items.



My menu includes a cranberry-pomegranate cocktail, thus the Ocean Spray. The gravy is for my mother-in-law; Hubby and I use the fresh cranberry sauce on our turkey, but she likes gravy and I don't know how to make it, nor do I have time in the heat of the preparations to make some from the drippings. She'll be happy to have one "normal" thing on her plate anyway. ;-)



Next stop was Whole Foods for the good seasonings and organic vegetables and eggs. Didn't like any of the Brussels sprouts at any of the stores, so they're still on my list for Tuesday night.



Jewel was quick and easy; they always have the size turkey breast I like, at the right price. A few more brand staples that they didn't have at Target too.



Last stop was Tony's Finer Foods for all the basic veggies. They had good prices on fresh herbs too -- sage, rosemary and parsley -- so I grabbed those to use instead of the dried versions I have at home.

So after all that, here is the menu:

Appetizer
Cranberry-pomegranate cocktail (either sparkling wine or vodka depending on what Hubby picks up)
Bacon-wrapped dates stuffed with goat cheese (inspired by Shopping Friend!)

Main meal
butternut squash soup (which I may make and serve on Wednesday night instead)
herbed roast turkey breast
homemade cranberry sauce
roasted Brussels sprouts with balsamic vinegar and thyme
roasted green beans with shallots
crescent rolls with roasted garlic and onion jelly (or butter, for the non- adventurous)
cornbread stuffing with sweet Italian turkey sausage (half of which will go to Shopping Friend)
cheesy horseradish mashed potatoes (or just plain roasted, Hubby is still choosing his preference)
slow-cooker spicy sweet potatoes (for me)

Dessert
pumpkin pie for MIL, apple for Hubby; hopefully I can find smaller tart versions because no one needs a pie to themselves.
(I don't like pie, so I save any remaining need for food for The Sandwich later that night.)

There are a couple of extra dishes in there than previous years, so I am not sure if I will keep them all. It's a crazy amount of food for three people, even if we are going to eat it for several days, and even if most of it is healthy and can be turned into other meals. I would love to ditch the mashed potatoes altogether; I can throw the sweets, green beans and turkey into a soup easily, but mashed potatoes are harder to turn into something else. I doubt MIL and Hubby will want to give them up, though.

We shall see what happens. I am already a day behind on preparations; I had planned to make the cornbread and a batch of oatmeal-pumpkin cookies on Sunday, but we got side-tracked on a different project. MIL is staying with us, so Hubby decided he needed to bring an old couch up from the basement to the spare room that he uses as an office. That plan did not work at all (he hadn't thought through how he was going to maneuver it through the kitchen and up the stairs without smashing everything in both rooms and ruining our new paint job), but instead I convinced him to deep-clean the office to make room for a new futon. He cleaned out closets and cabinets that had filled up with unused crap, and I tackled the various piles of paper that had become hidden into any corner we could find. In the end, we tossed about 10 bags of junk, I have a tub of paper to get shredded, and a trunk full of miscellaneous office things for donation. Then we got our new futon and put that together.



The futon cover is tan, Hubby bought a throw to cover it so the cats don't trash it too badly. Because we all know who will be using it more than the humans!



That shelf way in the back is all that remains of anything I used to store in the office. Thank you electronic bills; you have knocked down the amount of paper I need to have down to four little boxes. 

Anyway, today wasn't quite what I had in mind to prepare for Thanksgiving, but I think my MIL will be much more comfortable now than on an aerobed.

But! Lest you think I am some kind of amazing Thanksgiving planner/shopper, going to 4 stores with one list and preparing food for a week. Somehow I managed to do this:



Uh, didn't I cross it off the list after I bought it at...whoops, guess not. One will go in the freezer tomorrow.

I was proud that I did all that shopping and only bought this for myself as a treat:



Heh, I love my stories. (General Hospital is on a roll these days. All my favorite veterans are returning, hurray!)

What did you do this weekend to get ready for Turkey Day? Are you hosting or guesting? :)

Weekend Shopping

Aaaaaaand this is how I end up not posting for a week. Good thing I caught it by Tuesday!

So let's start with Friday.



Reduced to snapping photos in the bedroom mirror, UGH. But I loved this outfit, simple but still with a little zip. The blouse is from Gwynnie Bee, which I am LOVING. It is Netflix for clothes, and best of all, for clothes for plus-sized girls. I signed up for the 2-piece out at once deal, and I am busily rotating through them as fast as I can. I've had a few bobbles, mostly my own fault for not looking at the measurements closely and ordering something too big, but their customer service is absolutely the best I have ever experienced from a store, ever. EVER.



This one was a Style&Co layering top. The drape was excellent, the color a nice cobalt, and it added just the right punch I needed to my outfit. I liked it so much I repeated it on Saturday.



If you are interested in signing up for Gywnnie Bee, leave a comment with your email and I will send you an invite. (Disclaimer: the referral option does net me a free month.) I know a layering top isn't the most exciting promotion for a new service, but I am actually finding I like the subtler pieces best because they work so well with my closet, thus expanding the usage of what I already have without having to buy anything else. I've learned so far that I am a sucker for the draped neck tops. Love 'em!

Here are some of the pieces I have either coming to me or that I have added to my closet for them to send to me.



Back to the weekend! Sunday I went food shopping with my girlfriend J. We hit the Sunday farmer's market (one more to go before it is closed for the year, alas), and my favorite grocery store, Tony's Finer Foods.






Brussels sprouts! Still on the stalk!!





I had to get them.



Teeheehee. And this was my outfit for most of Sunday. New brown Target cardigan which breathed new life into a pink Gap v-neck tee and an infinity scarf. But I know you are just looking at my Brussels sprouts stalk.



Here, I removed the distraction. :)

Over at Tony's, there were many other equally mind-boggling foods, but these I managed not to buy.

For instance, fresh olives. Yes, FRESH. I don't even know, do you?





I want to try artichokes but it seems like a lot of work for very little payoff.



Chinese long beans. I barely like regular green beans, these seem like three times more.



My curiosity did finally get the better of me, so I bought two cactus pears. Then my friends had a random email conversation today that included this tidbit from Wikipedia:

The fruit of prickly pears, commonly called cactus fruit, cactus fig, Indian[6] fig or tuna in Spanish,[7] is edible, although it has to be peeled carefully to remove the small spines on the outer skin before consumption. If the outer layer is not properly removed, glochids can be ingested, causing discomfort of the throat, lips, and tongue, as the small spines are easily lodged in the skin.

"Glochids from prickly pears (Opuntia species) can cause an extremely pruritic, papular eruption called sabra dermatitis, which can easily be confused with scabies or fiberglass dermatitis."

Sooo...I will probably be throwing them away uneaten. I am not that brave!



Persimmons. Maybe I should try one of these while I wait for orange season to start.

Anyway, after all that we went to a sweet little breakfast joint near the market. I indulged in "potatoes Benedict" which were eggs Benedict over potato pancakes. Yummy, especially because the hollandaise was a nice light version instead of the usual congealed mess it can be.



Aaaaand that was my weekend. How was yours?

Oven-dried Tomatoes, Frog Jam, and assorted Bentos

Rose Rounds asked how I made the oven-roasted tomatoes. I found the idea on The Local Beet, one of my favorite localvore blogs. They used juliet tomatoes, which are long like Romas but smaller in size. I couldn't find any of those, and the Roma's were too expensive. Tony's had a sale on "cocktail" for 79 cents a package, so I grabbed one of those to experiment with.



Local Beet said to set the temperature to 200 degrees, then stick them in for 8-12 hours, unattended. The problem was I took that "unattended" thing too literally, and I let them stay in the whole 12 hours. (In my defense, I was out for the afternoon during the key end time, so I didn't check on them at all.)

They ended up way too dry. A few crumbled to powder in my hand.



So I was out 79 cents. Lesson learned!

The next batch I used the cherry tomatoes from my Dad's garden. I really did not want to ruin these, and they were even smaller than the cocktails, so at about the 6 hour mark I checked on them. They had shrunken quite a bit, but all of them still had pockets of moisture on their bottoms. Every hour after that I checked again. At hour 8, many of the smaller tomatoes were ready (dried but still soft and chewy looking), so I pulled those out and let the rest keep drying. An hour later, they were all done.



Looking forward to using them in frittatas, salads, and maybe a sauce. 

Another lovely treat I've been enjoying this summer has been frog jam.

Yes, you read that right.



I picked up a jar in New Buffalo this summer, and I am IN LOVE. Way better than plum butter, and even the blackberry jam I got at the farmer's market earlier in the summer.

It isn't made of frogs, thank goodness. But can you guess the ingredients?



Figs - raspberries - orange peel - ginger. F-R-O-G, teehee.

It is F-A-N-T-A-S-T-I-C. It's raspberry, but with richer, sharper notes from the figs and ginger, and a nice burst from the orange peel at the end. I am definitely going to be looking for this again next year. (Or my next visit to the New Buffalo area.)

Despite all the lovely food photos I have taken this summer, I actually haven't been that good at maintaining the foodstyle; I've skipped more than a couple of Sunday Cooking sessions, especially as the summer waned, and I was pretty bad about bringing in lunches on a daily basis. That said, when I did do it, I ate really well. My goal this fall is just to do it more often.


PB&frog jam sandwich, yogurt, blackberries, and Mom's bread and butter pickles. Easiest lunch ever!


Drier's ham salad sandwich, deviled egg salad, black bean and corn salad, blacberries, and a handful of snack mix. This was leftovers from the vacation. :)


Kale frittata, blue cheese coleslaw, yogurt and watermelon.


One of my favorite grilled meals of the summer: portabello swiss sausages, pineapple, and onions. We ate this and our turkey-bacon wrapped chicken thighs most often on the grill this year.


Pretty table set during my parent's visit. Hmm, maybe we should eat at the table more this fall...

What was your favorite foodstuff this summer?

Sunday Cooking: Mish-mosh

Yes, it's Thursday. Do not adjust your monitors. :)

It's been a rough week, and while I didn't think I did much in the way of cooking, somehow we've stretched it through the week so I figured I should post about it.

Also, I managed to take a few photos of outfits (GASP), and I bought new sandals. Yay, summer!



Lunch has consisted of all my favorite foods of the moment, cutely packaged up in little portion-controlled containers.

There was another batch of spaghetti squash au gratin



(and one of cauliflower au gratin for Hubby)



and a black-eyed pea and cucumber salad. (A recipe I make at some point every summer.)



Wasn't completely in love with how this turned out this time. I used a bag of frozen peas and boiled them, but they were really mushy in a way that fresh or canned peas do not get. Plus I didn't have enough feta, and I omitted olives for Hubby, so it was missing a good dose of salt it needed to give it enough flavor. Hubby liked it though!

Lastly, there have been lots and lots of strawberries. Sometimes with yogurt at lunch, sometimes with a slice of angel food cake as dessert at night.



I didn't get any pictures last night, but Hubby grilled a couple of frozen crab cakes for me (he had a burger) and a pineapple cut into long strips. Warm, carmelized pineapple was an excellent side dish, then I finished off the meal by cutting the rest of it up and piling it into a bowl with cool strawberries and soft angel food cake. No pun intended, but it was heavenly.

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It's been hot this week, and both Hubby and I have been stressed about work so there are nightly chats on the patio under the umbrella while he grills our dinner. George likes to come out and join us. I think he really likes the feel of the warm cement under him.





He is such a weirdo. :)

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My hair is much longer this summer, and I am rather enjoying it. My new stylist gave me a long bob; a lot of the time I have been letting it naturally curl up at the edges instead of forcing it to curl under with a brush and blow dryer, and it just feels healthier and more energized.



This is definitely the summer of draping blouses, although some work better than others. I love the vibrancy of the the hot pink of this Old Navy blouse, as well as the drape at my shoulders. It buckles weirdly at my waist, though, which doesn't photograph well. Oh well! My chunky smoky quartz statement necklace and a gold bracelet add the right amount of dressiness for super-hot weather.



Another variation on the same sandals and black pants look, this time with a coral faux-wrap sweater from Forth & Towne (boy, I still miss that store), white tank and tri-stone necklace. The wind was blowing every which way that morning, so this is the best shot I got.



Sheila has been doing neutrals month over at Ephemera, which inspired this combo that I have been wearing like crazy. Target short-sleeved cardigan and this darling tie tank from Lands End -- that's the whole outfit. I am having a pair of white modern Gap bootcut pants hemmed right now (my first white pants maybe ever!) and I am really curious to see if I can wear this top combo with that too.

Funny, I just realized I have been wearing the same Clarks olive wedge sandals in all 3 shots. I have been rotating through my other ones, I swear! The flat sandal craze has been intriguing me, too; most of mine are heeled wedges in various colors (turquoise, orange, nude, olive, etc) which are great for work. But I wanted some for play, too. Behold!



I know, right?!

The Sam Edelman Gigi's are one of the sandals of the season, and come in a million colors. I debated going for the mixed-print pair, but in the end I could not resist the stripes.

The other pair I got were the DV by Dolce Vita Archer's, another hot sandal of the season. I needed a blue casual pair to go with my maxidress for our summer vacation, and I couldn't resist these when I saw them on Corporette.

The last new shoes I am getting are a pair of summer walking shoes, for exercise. (Yes, I said it.) How can anyone say "no" to walking if they have these adorable New Balance Classics in their closet? On sale for $49, too!

(I am exchanging the 9s for a 9 1/2, but overall they look and feel great.)

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So, food, outfits, random cat photo, shoes. I think I covered all the necessary topics! Am I forgiven for skipping a few days/weeks of posts? :)