Month: January 2024

daily recap · what we ate

Day 1402: Lasagna

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I had an awful migraine at 2 am so the day was a bit of a wash—dishes, some recipe writing but that’s about it. For lunch I had some canned soup and popcorn.

I was planning on making pork chops but Matt was a little late from work and we ended up getting the Thursday night lasagna special instead. So lasagna, salad and garlic bread. Hopefully the chops will be good tomorrow?

Did a tiny bit of crafting and did the list for grocery shopping tomorrow. I saw online Aldi has tangerines and I can only hope that’s true! My go-to location doesn’t have curb side pick up so I can’t see a stock list but after last weeks fiasco of going to another store I don’t want to mix it up and go to a different location. It’s supposed to be very cold and possibly snowy next weekend so I want to get enough groceries to get me through next week too if possible.

Seeing a lot of news about masking lately! Hopkins is requiring them again even if they downplayed it with “We anticipate this requirement to be in effect on a short-term basis while influenza-like illness rates are high.” which is not what I would hope from a health care giant! I have an appointment later in the month and I hope they will be masking then, they haven’t the last few times despite being very close to me and asking about COVID exposure.

daily recap · repurposing leftovers · what we ate

Day 1401: Doughnuts!

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Matt took my dad to an appointment today and came back with doughnuts from a fancy bakery! It’s rare to see fancy yeast doughnuts. Most of the bakeries seem to do the fun flavors on cake doughnuts which are trash doughnuts. They were really good! One had cream cheese in the middle and the other had coconut and caramel.

For lunch I had some jjajangmyeon with leftover pot roast and Matt had some soup.

For dinner we had fried rice with the leftover chicken.

daily recap · what we ate

Day 1400: Soup

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For lunch we just had some canned soup—minestrone for me and chicken noodle for Matt.

We had huge amount of rain today! It rained heavily for about 12 hrs. A lot of the city seems to have flooded or been without power but we are in pretty good shape. The yard looks like a swimming pool but the basement seems dry and the lights flickered a little but stayed on.

For dinner I had leftover pot roast over rice and Matt had eggs and rice because his stomach felt a little off.

We started the penultimate knitting project from the book! It’s a little stuffed bear. I’m using yarn from an earlier project from the book but I think it will be enough. Both projects are pretty small.

We made some rice tonight so we can make fried rice tomorrow with the leftover chicken and I defrosted some pork chops for Thursday. Since Matt didn’t feel great, I don’t want to do a big shop tomorrow as planned. We can eke by a couple more days. I’d rather shop when we know how he is feeling and get better dates. Last week he did a shop and the dates were pretty close and we had to cook everything up right away.

daily recap · what we ate

Day 1399: Grilled Cheese

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We are trying to keep our leftovers for dinner so grilled cheese it was! I also had some popcorn.

That was the last of the bread. I haven’t really done a good shop in a good bit between holidays and Aldi just not having much food when I went last week.

I’m really tired of coming up with lunches. Now that we cook so much and our take out is limited I’ve been prioritizing leftovers for dinners vs lunch like we did in the before times. So many lunch suggestions are food I can’t really eat a lot of (salads, grain bowls) or require a lot of work.

For dinner we had the leftover meatloaf and broccoli pasta salad. It reheated really well in a skillet.

daily recap · what we ate

Day 1398: Pancakes

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We had pancakes for breakfast. We managed to play a new game (Patchwork, which was really ugly and dirty looking for a game about quilts) and move some older games to the shelves we bought not too long ago.

I bought a tiny pink rigid heddle loom and we assembled that. It took longer than you’d think! I’m excited to have a really small one I can just weave on my lap in the evenings. My other looms are much bigger and require a lot of moving around to accommodate them.

The tree is finally down! I haven’t moved my floor loom back to that space yet but it’s not an emergency.

For dinner we heated up the pot roast and had it over spinach mashed potatoes. It was a great idea making it yesterday, it’s always better the second day and it made dinner really easy. We still have another meal’s worth.

Matt finally caught up to me with our knitting projects! We only have two more to go in the book, a little bear and a bag. We took our first lesson last February so my goal is to be done the book by March if not sooner.

daily recap · what we ate

Day 1397: Fried Chicken

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We slept to like 10 am! Dottie got up in the middle of the night and we were all so tired. The dreary weather meant it was really dark late in the day so the sun didn’t wake us up peeking around the blackout shades.

We had our main meal at lunch which was nice! I like getting that over with during the day when we can. I hate waiting around until the evening to cook.

Matt made some what we call “Grandpop chicken” and I made pasta salad with broccoli, marinated pepper, parm, seasoning, olive spread and dressing. Lots of leftovers!

I took the ornaments off the tree and boxed up the ceramic tree and the advent calendar so tomorrow we just have the take own the actual tree and the strands of lights on it. We listened to a little Christmas music because Matt added to his mix for this year but we didn’t really end up listening to it much in December.

Matt made pot roast in the late afternoon to eat tomorrow. My goal is to actually do something fun tomorrow! At least play a game or something since the weather is bad. Time keeps getting away from us on the weekends. Now at least the main dish is ready to go and we can just make a side or two.

For our smaller meal we had kimchi dumplings and shumai from the freezer and Cara Cara oranges for health.

More French tv watching and I finished a cute book. I had it on hold for months after suggesting it to the library and didn’t remember anything about it. Apparently it made Reese’s Book Club because there were like 100+ people waiting for 5 copies after me!

daily recap · what we ate

Day 1396: Muffuletta

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I saw a sandwich place not too far away had muffulettas as a special made with the right bread so I went and picked them up while Matt got us our chocolate order since we missed it for Christmas.

They were so good! Worth the trek.

After that we weren’t too hungry so for dinner I made roasted radishes and updated a meatloaf from a community cookbook. Lots of meatloaf leftover! It was really good!

It was one of those days where I don’t know where the time went. I didn’t want to get too involved in anything before I left for lunch and then the afternoon sort of drifted away. Matt had his piano lesson.

daily recap · what we ate

Day 1395: Peanut Butter Orange Bread

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I did a tiny weaving today and knocked out some work.

For lunch I had some cucumber, pretzels, cheese and leftover dip then I updated a recipe for a peanut orange bread from a community cookbook and wrote up a post for next week. It was pretty good!

For dinner I made some sesame shichi-mi tōgarashi coho salmon and zucchini and served it over rice.

I defrosted some meatloaf mix for tomorrow—Matt had bought some yesterday and I wasn’t sure if it would actually be enough to make meatloaf with. I was going to freeze it and then when I opened the freezer to see if we had room for it, I realized we had frozen some recently so I defrosted that. Matt has a piano lesson tomorrow night so it would be good to have something easy for dinner and there is meatloaf recipe that I’d like to try in the cookbook I made the bread from.

We started watching Le crime lui va si bien and it’s pretty cute! I thought it was filmed in or took place in the eighties from the screen shots but apparently not. I was reading a French food magazine while we were watching and I think that was too much French all at once!

daily recap · what we ate

Day 1394: Pizza

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This morning I went back to an Aldi I used to shop at a lot years ago and it was a huge mistake! The only “good” thing was more people were masking than were when there were actual mask mandates at that location.

The parking lot was super crowded, they barely had any meat or basics like pasta. They also had a huge bin of cardboard boxes (I guess for people who don’t have bags?) right as you walk into the front door to the tiny produce area. A worker rammed his cart into me. It was a mess. It reminded me of early days in the pandemic.

I ended up getting a handful of items I had picked up before I realized they were out of everything else and left. Matt ended up going to our regular location later after work and got most of the rest of what we wanted. Enough to get us through the weekend anyway! It looks like it might be rough weather. Maybe even snow. We haven’t had measurable snow in like 700 days.

When I got back, Matt was making pasta salad with the leftover tuna sweet corn from NYD. I had a popcorn snack late in the afternoon.

Dinner was just the leftover pizza we made and sort of a giant pizza roll up he had made with scraps. It looked like a pizza bialy. And steamed broccoli, for health.

Finished Shetland! I hope it comes back, it was so much better than the previous couple seasons

daily recap · repurposing leftovers · what we ate

Day 1393: Chili

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Today was pretty chill. I worked on the community cookbook project, did some weaving. Matt went back to work. The dogs played outside a lot. It was chilly but sunny.

For lunch I heated up some leftover baked potatoes with eggs, a frozen sausage patty and onion.

For dinner we had leftover chili and tortilla chips. I didn’t realize we didn’t have much chili left; I would have made cornbread. It was fine though!

I finished Lessons in Chemistry on Apple + while I worked and it’s wild that in an adaption of a book about a woman overcoming sexism and adversity they’d make a quarter of the show be about her boyfriend who dies quite early on and the past even he didn’t know about. None of that is in the book!