Category Archives: doing it wrong

My mother-in-law makes these cookies – I have the recipe but I can’t put my fingers on it right this second.

They are no-bake cookies and I think it’s butter, sugar, butterscotch drops, quick-cook oats, butter, and sugar.

She made us a bunch and we were stuffing our faces. My husband finally asked me to share some with colleague.

I warned colleague: These are Narnia cookies – Turkish Delight.

I said: These are the best and worst cookies you’ve ever had.

Best because they are yummy, worst because once you have them you can’t stop thinking about them. If they are in the house, you are constantly bargaining: should I eat one? One bite? Half of one? They are so sweet. Maybe just 2 bites. I’ll wait until after dinner. Three bites.

It goes on and on.

I gave colleague his bag and then in the afternoon, in a strained voice asked: Aren’t we going to try those cookies?

After he tried one, he agreed.

I don’t even use very many programs or apps yet all my devices (said with disdain) are like puppies, whining and whimpering because I need to do something for them. WordPress is totally needy. Please update now.

Update yourself. And there’s a little widget telling me that 7 other things need to update. And then my phone has a notice because some app that I still don’t even know how to use needs to be updated. Adobe Flash – I swear that thing wants to be updated every month and it always interrupts me when I’m right in the middle of something. And remember when I updated my operating system and now I can’t get Acrobat to work right?

Technology is like everything in life, sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes a complete annoying pain in the butt.

So this is the garden. This is the garden with me having done nothing except bury a few withered potatoes. A lot of what you can see there is weeds and sunflower volunteers.

I’ve partially cleaned it up and will try to do it a bit more completely this weekend. I’m ambivalent about the garden this year. For sure there will be tomatoes and pumpkins. And I tidied up the raspberries but I’m not in the mood to do the rest.

I originally was going to talk about my lunch today but I was so busy at work I never got around to it. I’ve written about this before but when I bring my lunch to work I tend to bring way too much. I have a bunch of tiny plastic containers and I bring little bits of leftovers, hunks of cheese, crackers, nuts, cookies, vegetable wedges with pickles. Today I had hummus and Cheez Its. (Which I did not eat together.) I also bought a bag of those tiny tangerines and I had a bunch of those. I thought I could make this more interesting but now I’ve had a long day plus on my lunch hour I went on a big walk with a friend and now I am beat, body mind & spirit.

Shadow got a treat and he ate every bit except for the green thing. Silly dog.

I could swear I made fun of this service in a post somewhere but I can’t find it right now.

Kira gave me a week of Blue Apron for my birthday and we finally signed up for it and got our meals last Friday.

The stuff comes in a big box with cooler packs. Here is everything from the box which will make 3 meals.

Look at this adorable tiny avocado and onion.

The knick knacks are spices and little things you need to add. We had to supply salt, pepper and olive oil.

Here we are ready to go with our blackened cod and red rice salad. (Red rice is still cooking.)

It was really delicious and a recipe I would never have tracked down on my own. It exceeded our expectations. The portions are generous enough for 2 good eaters plus a little left over for 1 person to have for lunch the next day.

The other two meals were a Chicken Verjus with pearled barley that Bob made last night for his Mom. I’m going to eat the leftovers as soon as I hit the publish button on this. And tonight we’re making a Lamb Meatball stew, to have with some other dishes with Bob’s Mom.

Voila!

The menu instructions are well done and mostly easy to follow. There were a couple of steps that I thought were not explained very well but since I have experience cooking I could figure out. The “time to make” estimates were slightly delusional unless you only counted the actual cook time and not the prep.

I would say that this service is best for people who like to cook and want to learn more dishes or maybe don’t have well stocked kitchens. I would say it’s not good for people who come home tired and hungry and need to throw something together really quickly. The meals didn’t take long to make but you still have to chop, peel and brown stuff.

But fun to try. Great gift idea Kira!! Thank you.

Home!

Great long weekend. Terrific weather. Lots of good food and great company.

I always wish I had one more day.

I can’t think of one good story to tell right now. It seems like every single trip we sleep like the dead all weekend with fun naps in between and the night before we go home we can’t sleep more than a few hours. I’m a little crossed eyed at the moment and trying to get organized for my work week.

I’m sure I’ll think of something brilliant later.

I thought of a great story while I was pumping gas but now I can’t remember what it was.

It seems like every time I am getting ready to go out of town and I have a million things to do, there is some sort of traffic meltdown and I get home late from work.

This happened again tonight.

Here’s a quick story about carrots.

I love carrots and eat them almost every day. But mostly I only like raw carrots.

I don’t mind carrots cooked, but if I see a recipe that’s for just carrots, like glazed carrots, it would never occur to me to make that.

We had cooked carrots at Priscilla’s for St. Patrick’s Day. They were perfectly fine.

I just never think to cook carrots.

Behave. See you in a few days.

(Also more tulip photos to come. The light was poop when I got home tonight so most of the photos I took look like deer-in-the headlights flowers. I’ll try again.)