In the kitchen

I’ve had one heck of a busy weekend. My computer was nonfunctional for most of it, so I didn’t even have any distractions to keep me from being rather productive. I’m also going out of town next week (vacation, yay!!!) and felt the need to get some things put together and put away around here.  On Saturday Jeff and I undertook a major closet-and-bedroom clean-out.  I’m pleased it’s done, and amazed at what was lurking in dark corners, but ow! that’s a task I hope I don’t have to repeat for a while.  My bag of mending is now full (ick), I have some things that will become fabric for other projects, and the rest got donated.

After a Sunday morning hike that did NOT go awry, we felt some food preparation was in order.  So we threw on our favorite aprons (hehe) and got busy making a mess.  I think we overdid it.  We made enough food for the whole week, and then some. I’ve been on a real food kick lately.  We scaled back our vegetable deliveries to every other week because we were just drowning in okra and eggplant and things, but we still have found ourselves eating at home and generally having more fun with eating.

I’ve had to be pretty creative sometimes, doing new things with the same ingredients, making stuff up as I go along.  It’s a new experience for this suburban kid to encounter a surplus of seasonal foods instead of the grocery store’s “sameness of variety.”  It’s working out, and as you can see below, our vegetable deliveries have gotten to be exciting for the whole family, not just for Jeff and I.

At some point in the last few months the deliveries of local produce, the hiking, and the unexpected vegetarian turn must have gotten to us.  We apparently decided that packaged food companies just weren’t doing it right, and that we’d just have to start make things ourselves. For example, Jeff has now taken to making his own energy/protein bars from a recipe based on Alton Brown’s protein bars.  Meanwhile, I wanted a salty snack that wasn’t Doritos, so I baked some cajun-flavored garbanzo beans.  Kind of like the ones here, but no pistachios and cajun-oriented.  TASTY.

We also made the buttnernut squash and sweet potato soup, pico de gallo and a version of my favorite charro beans, rosemary potatoes and some interesting gluten-free bread.  The bread was yeasty and it rose! (this is a major accomplishment for me).  And maybe we made something else, I can’t remember anymore.  I remember I cut up a lot of vegetables, and the onions were very strong, and that the liquid for the bread just wouldn’t get up to room temperature.

Kind of amazed at all the cooking we’ve done lately, really.  Stuffed squash, pizzas with feta and basil, every squash-and-zucchini dish imaginable, and a lot of stuff with pretty brown eggs and lovely berries.  Summer may be long and hot, but at least it grows a lot of nice pretty green stuff.

In other news, I have received my swap partner’s package and she’s received mine.  I love getting packages, and this one was full of fun stuff, although the swap rules are that I can’t show you what I got until October 8.  But I can show you what I made for her, which was such fun!  I’ll do that tomorrow