Feta, onion, basil, and mushroom mini meatloaf with oven fries and a garden salad. The meatloaf was top notch, and I will be repeating the combination.

Pizza night! I’ve given up trying to make the perfect crispy pizza crust and am now focusing on making the perfect standard crust. I also changed my sauce recipe to make it thicker, so I could put more on without it getting soggy. Toppings included pepperoni, mushroom, grape tomatoes, feta, onion, and provolone cheese. Lin declared this the best pizza I’ve ever made. It was quite yummy!

Basic stew with beef, cabbage, carrots, onion, and potatoes. This is the first stew I’ve ever made that didn’t use a tomato base. It’s also the first huge pot of stew that vanished in one day. Apparently, we liked it. A lot.

Spinach tagliatelle with beef and mushrooms topped with repurposed pizza sauce and shavings of provolone cheese, served with steamed broccoli. Mmm, mmm, good!

Last night’s dinner was a bit of a culinary adventure. I had some veggies I needed to use before the next box of groceries arrived but that I wasn’t entirely sure I really liked (or knew what to do with, especially all together). Greenling to the rescue! One of the recipes they sent along with the groceries used the things that needed using, so I made it!

Cabbage, fennel, spring onion, garlic, and snow peas (which I added to the recipe) sautéed in an orange juice sauce, served with poached Italian sausage. I wasn’t sure what the veggies would taste like, and I was concerned it would be really sweet or otherwise obnoxious in flavor. It wasn’t! The flavors all blended well and ended up being really mild. I can’t say I’d go out of my way to buy the ingredients to make it again, but should I find myself with them in my fridge, I’d definitely repeat this.

There then, all caught up on the food porn! Hope I didn’t make you too hungry!

And … because my grocer sent along extra peaches today and now I also have a load of fresh fruit, PLUS I ordered too much milk, today seemed like a great day to get out the ice cream machine, clean it up, and make some peach sherbet. So light and fluffy and OH MY GOD PEACHY! Best idea I have had all week!

Now, I’m stuffed. I have to sit quietly and digest. LOL!

And the curls … the CURLS! I don’t even have a clue how to deal with them. The only reason I
haven’t gone to get my hair cut short again, aside from laziness, is that I’m curious to see how it looks even longer. It might be really lovely! But, with that said, I don’t know how much longer I can tolerate the wildness of my hair (or the gray hairs either).

First up is pork and veggie stir fry with snow peas, cabbage, spring onions, and mushrooms with a mustard sauce, served on a bed of steamed rice.

Last night we had oven fried chicken breast, steamed broccoli and squash, and a huge salad (with kale chip sprinkles on top).

While our meals have always been tasty and as healthy as possible, I have to say, now that we are eating even more local, seasonal, and organic than ever (thanks to Greenling), meals have been extraordinarily tasty the last couple of weeks. Also, cooking with so many fine and fresh foods has been an absolute joy! I’m so glad we’ve upgraded our diet once again (and I’m tickled it all gets delivered to my door).

Now to move on to all the other works that need to be finished.

This was my first time making an angel food cake from scratch! It turned it so perfectly, I wonder if I can do it so well again in the future … or if it was a fluke. LOL!

I have discovered I hate, hate, hate fresh and raw kale. Yuck! Don’t like the texture or the flavor one bit. But I love, love, love kale chips! Good thing I found a way to like kale, seeing as there’s a huge pile of it in my fridge. LOL!

Sunday, Lin set about installing them. Naturally, it wasn’t as easy as it should have been, and he ended up having to go back to the store to buy everything needed to totally replace the plumbing under the kitchen sink. All of it. Ugh. Poor Lin!

He did a wonderful job, and I love, love, love the kitchen sink now. It’s just works so well, it really highlights just how very terrible the kitchen sink was before … with its 1960 fixtures and broken disposal and plumbing held together with duct tape (prior owners obviously not plumbers – we’ve found other plumbing held together with duct tape too). Now it has a nice high gooseneck faucet with pull-out sprayer (never had a sprayer – I love the sprayer), an oh-so-quiet Insinkerator garbage disposal (really, it’s really quiet), and plumbing that drains everything away FAST (and doesn’t leak).

How about a couple photos?

Here’s the wonderful sprayer faucet. It’s not exactly what I wanted, but I’ve discovered I have expensive tastes. This was as close as we could get to what I wanted without breaking the bank. I love it though, and I think the one I was in love with would have eventually annoyed me anyway. And ignore the wretched tile and awful counter. I have spent untold hours and gallons of chemicals scrubbing it all, and this is the best it gets.

Here’s the underlying plumbing! Lin made sure everything was perfect, and he did a wonderful job on it! I wasn’t expecting new plumbing just yet, and I know he wasn’t thrilled about having to get into it yesterday, but I’m super-duper happy to have all new plumbing under there and no more leaks! And yeah, the cabinet is wretched too. Someday in the future it will all be going away. It’s not high on the list, but it’s on the list.

Now I want to go do tonight’s dishes! I am never going to enjoy doing dishes, but it goes so much more quickly and easily now. Doesn’t feel quite as much like torture anymore. Wich isn’t to say I won’t still complain about doing dishes from time to time, but I promise to complain less! LOL!

And … I LOVE MY HUSBAND!

The homemade pizza I made a couple days ago. I didn’t feel like cooking, and I’m really trying hard to stop ordering delivery foods like, say, pizza, so making a pizza was the easiest thing I could come up with for dinner that night. A really grainy whole wheat crust topped with ground beef, mushrooms, black olives, bacon, onion, and a variety of cheeses. It was yummy. It’s pretty hard to screw up a pizza.