A confession

I have a confession to make – I don’t like Halloween.

I know this isn’t a very popular opinion, but I can’t seem to help myself. I should like Halloween. I want to like Halloween. It’s in one of my favorite seasons of the year, there are parties, there's the candy….what isn’t to like? But I just can’t help it.

Pumpkin carving? No thanks. I never have the patience to get all of the guts out of the pumpkin, so there inevitably are those unsightly strings hanging behind my pumpkin’s nose/eyes/mouth. And I can never think of anything more creative than the circle eyes, triangle nose, toothy grin combo.

Dressing up? I’ll pass. Once again, I’m not creative or patient enough to come up with a great costume. And what I do come up with always ends up being really dowdy, and that’s never good when you’re surrounded by a sea of women taking full advantage of the opportunity to dress as sexy as they possibly can (see Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls).

Luckily, I now have a reason to like Halloween. My precious niece was born last year, just a few days before, so now we’ll be able to celebrate her joining our family amongst all of the pumpkin carving, dressing up madness.



My niece, a few days old, in her pumpkin onesie - a pretty fantastic thing to celebrate.

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And despite everything I wrote above, what are my plans for the weekend? A pumpkin carving contest tonight and a dress-up Halloween party tomorrow night! I’m nothing if not a good sport.

My costume this year? Crazy pickle arm man. Thank you Adam Sandler.

Stuffed peppers, adapted.....and TGIF

This is so very exciting. I actually have a recipe to share! Or at least the makings of a recipe! Or at least the idea for what could be a really great recipe!

I’ve had the hankering for a while to make stuffed peppers. A fall-esque, comfort food meal that the weather and life have been screaming out for. With these desires in mind, I happened upon this recipe from The Pioneer Woman, and was struck the idea to make stuffed peppers using the sauce and pineapple combination in her recipe. Genius, right?!?

What I did:

• Made some rice (1 cup uncooked).
• Put a large pot of water to boil and cleaned out 4 medium sized green peppers.



• Cut up ½ an onion.
• Put the green peppers in the boiling water and let them boil for about 5 minutes.
• Removed the peppers and stood them up in a small glass pan.
• Preheated the oven to 350.
• Cooked the onion and a clove of garlic in some olive oil until the onions were translucent.
• Chopped the pineapple from a can into smaller pieces and put them in the pan with the onion.
• Put a drained can of diced tomatoes in the same pan and let it all cook for a few minutes while I put together the sauce from the The Pioneer Woman’s recipe (I halved her recipe, and I also used veggie broth instead of beef broth).
• Poured the sauce in with the pineapples, tomatoes and onion and let cook until the sauce had thickened up a good bit.

• Once the sauce was thickened, combined the whole mixture with the rice, and then spooned it into the waiting peppers.

• Popped it in the oven for about 25 minutes so that everything warms through.

Overall, this was pretty good – although not as good as I was hoping. I think I will try this again, but with a few modifications. In my opinion, the sauce needs the beef broth for richness – the veggie broth just didn’t quite cut it. I would also probably add a little more sugar (that blasted sweet tooth), and some of the juice from the can of tomatoes. The other thing this dish is missing is some protein – perhaps it could be made with quinoa instead of rice? It would also be good with some ground beef or tenderloin tips…..yum.

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And with that – it’s Friday, and I’m so very glad it is! I’m looking forward to a very autumnal weekend, with a visit from an old friend and playing tourist in my own city. I might even try to bake on Sunday, and who knows, maybe I’ll have another semblance of a recipe to pass along!

  

Happy weekend!

A trial run...

This past weekend, the mister and I babysat for some friends of ours. They have an adorable 10 month old that we watched for a few hours while they attended a wedding for the evening.

I have to say in a sense it felt like a trial run for us. We know that we definitely want to have children not too far in the future, so it felt a little bit like we were seeing how we would do, if only for a few hours, for one night.

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When my sister and I were young, an older cousin and his wife asked my parents if they could take my sister and I on some outings, as a trial run of sorts to help them decide if they ultimately wanted to have children, or were ready for it.

The story goes that we were all sitting around a booth at Chuck E. Cheese, and I, completely unprompted, announced in an extremely loud voice, "I have lice!" I can only imagine that at that moment, I was proud of this fact. It was something that made me unique, which is always a good thing when you're 5, and heck, I got to stay home from school even though I wasn't sick. What wasn't to be excited about? My cousin's wife was totally mortified, and insists that everyone at the tables around us all turned to stare at the little girl that was proud of her lice.

While I know everyone else finds me yelling about my lice the funny part of this story, I find the humor in the fact that my sister and I acted as one of the determining factors of if my cousins were going to have children or not. Nothing we did obviously deterred them too much, as they did end up having two kids of their own.

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I think our first trial run went pretty well too. We had fun playing with her (she's exceptionally adorable and sweet) got her fed, in bed with a clean diaper, and asleep by 7:15. A success all around, but let's be honest - a few hours on a Saturday night, a brief outing to Chuck E. Cheese, none of this can really tell you how you'll be as parents. And while our little taste of it went well, I have to say that for now, I'm pretty content with this bundle of fluff being the only living thing I have to take care of.

She's pretty low maintenance, and cute to boot.

Same kitchen...



Same kitchen - Different perspective


So here’s the deal. I’ve struggled with this blogging thing. When I jumped into this, I had high hopes of a blog that had phenomenal original and delicious recipes, witty commentary, thought provoking insight, and illuminating photography. I was not only slightly delusional, but I was totally focused on the wrong thing: the outcome.  I wanted instantly to be really really good at blogging.

I got frustrated because it wasn’t turning out as I had hoped. I was struggling with coming up with original recipes (hadn’t I heard of adapting?), my photos were lackluster (not to mention taking photos whilst cooking is HARD), and honestly, I didn’t think I had much of anything to contribute. I had (and this is nothing new for me) set up ridiculously high expectations for myself and I wasn’t meeting them.

I’ve had the itch to come back to blogging, and I’ve been trying to think through what this drive was – why did I want to try this again when it just left me feeling frustrated before? 

In my last attempt, not only were my expectations too high from the outset, but I focused too much on the external results of the blog. What does the blog look like? Who’s reading it? Were the recipes good? Were people enjoying it? And while all of this is important on one level, it’s not the real point here. Honestly, the real point is a little bit of a selfish one. The real point is that for me, this is a creative outlet – one that I’m seriously lacking right now. It’s a place to write, and since it has the added pressure of the fact that someone might just read it, a place to really work on my writing. It’s a place to share recipes, and since it has the added pressure of the fact that someone else might try them out, a place to really work on being a better cook. It’s a place to share photos, and since it has the added pressure that someone might just see them, a place to really work on my photography skills. It’s a place to CREATE something, and I need that so badly.

And so I’m trying this again, this time focusing on the creative process itself.  This blog is now a place to cultivate and improve my writing, cooking, photography - free (as much as I can manage) of those previous skigh high expectations.

Different approach, same galley kitchen.