this is how i cook

I used to hate making dinner. There were several ways I made it harder for myself and the way I do things: 1. I thought the problem was trying to come up with ideas (because I tried to make unique meals every night for two or three weeks) so I tried a few different dinner planning programs to see if that would help, but they ended up requiring hours in the kitchen for every meal. 2. I thought I needed to start by picking recipes and then put all the ingredients on my grocery list, which lead to complex meals with a lot of ingredients and long lists. 3. I had a complicated interpretation of what a “meal” was. It had to be interesting and have a lot of variety. It was like I thought all our meals had to be like going to a different nice restaurant every day. 4. I have a list of food sensitivities, so most recipes I would have to modify quite a bit to make them work for me.

Turkey bacon, sweet potato with
almond butter, kale and peppers.

With all of these restrictions on meal planning, I found it overwhelming and mostly didn’t plan dinners. So we just had whatever I could put together last minute, which was just stressful in a different way.

Over the last nine months I’ve revamped the way I think about dinner and it’s made a huge difference for us. We sit down to dinner together almost every night and I’ve gotten into a routine that works for me. I do go to the grocery store a lot, but some of that is more to do with the fact that we eat a lot of fruit and veg and I can only fit so much in the fridge at a time. Our kids eat a lot guys, it’s ridiculous.

So here is my “new” method (which might be everyone else’s regular method and I’m just late to the party):

First, I keep a variety of meat that we eat often in the freezer. I get it at Costco and I try to have some combination of chicken, ground turkey, shrimp, salmon, beef and turkey burgers, sausage and sometimes red meat of some kind. I do the same thing with carbs and vegetables. We usually have brown rice, potatoes, quinoa, corn and peas, spinach, tomato, red pepper, zucchini, green beans and some kind of squash.

Chicken, zucchini, brown rice

Seared ahi tuna, brown rice,
kale and peppers.

Then I pick something to start with. It’s often a protein, but occasionally I have a spaghetti squash or specialty thing I want to use so I’ll work around that. Then I see what’s in the fridge and decide how I’m going to season it and what to put with it. The main thing is that I keep it to a simple protein, carb, veg combo and add in whatever extras we have. The other day I had some ripe mangos and I thought that would sound good with spicy shrimp, so I did chili lime shrimp with cilantro lime rice, cole slaw and mangos. Last week I had a lot of zucchini, which the kids don’t love. So I shredded it and mixed it in with chicken cooked with Italian seasoning, brown rice, red peppers and cheese. I put a lot of zucchini in and the kids ate it up! If I want to cook ground turkey I look and see if I have avocado or corn or other things that go with taco seasoned meat. Or maybe I have potatoes and green beans so I do meatloaf.

Chili lime shrimp, green beans with
pine nuts, cilantro lime rice.

Zucchini boats with taco meat.

I have found that keeping the house stocked with ingredients we like and then just paring things together based on what we have and what I’m in the mood for is much easier for me than planning out specific meals. We end up eating a lot of similar things (like you'll notice from my pictures that brown rice is popular with me), which isn't the problem I once thought it was. It's actually really nice because we eat what we like, and isn't that the way it should be?

anatomy of a kitchen table

the kitchen is my happy place and baking is my jam

I love baking -- bagels, muffins, cookies, bars, brownies, cake -- all of it. I wasn't always this way. It used to seem like torture to work in the kitchen. I assumed a lot of nonexistent rules about what I was supposed to be doing and how I should be doing it. I hated making cakes that were supposed to look good -- I am NOT a cake decorator, and it turns out I don't have to be. Because one day I discovered how much I enjoyed making cookies, and a whole new world opened up. Cookies are the perfect little handheld treat that aren't expected to be fancy or decorative. Once I realized that, I realized nothing else doesn't has to be fancy or decorative either. Baking is about sharing and showing people you care and giving them a little love, indulgence and nostalgia.

Recently I had a resurgence in my desire to bake, try new recipes, and generally have treats around more often for visitors and my family. (It's a bit unfortunate that this resurgence coincided with my husband coming up on an Air Force PT test, but whatevs.) This new zeal for all things treat is thanks to the show Chef's Table. I watched a few episodes and they weren't bad, but they were about fancy, expensive restaurants that regular people could never go to with tiny plates. So it lost my interest quickly. But then, THEN! they released season 4, and that first episode got me good. Season 4 is all about pastry, and episode one is about a woman who's eyes light up when she talks about cookies and cake. She and I are very different, and I likely will never own or run a bakery, but she loves baking like I do. And I might have teared up a little watching it. She speaks my language, and she made me want to bake.
"Life's too short to worry about how many cookies I ate today."

With that in mind: There are two basic elements of baking that are my very favorite: The Process and The Sharing. Let's talk about them.

The Process.
Baking is fun, that's the first thing you have to know. And it starts with deciding what recipe to make. I love perusing my favorite baking websites until I see something that strikes my fancy (and then sometimes perusing a little longer because I'm just having such a good time.) I even enjoy checking to see if I have all the right ingredients, or at least most of them and substitutions for the rest. Being an absent minded baker has encouraged me to learn appropriate substitutions for a lot of ingredients. Then comes the best part: standing in the kitchen measuring and pouring and mixing and kneading and folding and whipping and spreading. It's like meditation -- my mind clears and I relax. I get caught up in the process and nothing else really matters for awhile. This is why I like making bagels: they have a multi step process that includes mixing, kneading, proofing, shaping, boiling and baking. There's just so many things to get excited about there!

The Sharing. 
The very, very best thing about making treats is giving them away. I love making my kids' favorite things and I enjoy sneaking a little into their lunchboxes when I can. I love taking cookies to my neighbors. I love bringing a chocolate hazelnut cheesecake with dark chocolate ganache to a potluck. I loved making cookies for all the volunteers at our church Sunday morning. But what I love the most is watching people eat and enjoy all of it. Not in a weird creepy way, and not because I need or want compliments. It brings me more joy to see people enjoy my treats than it ever would to eat them myself. It's like getting the best hug you've ever had, or like being wrapped in a warm blanket on a snowy day, or like cuddling a puppy, or...well, you get the gist. Enjoying others enjoy my treats is why I bake, and I would imagine it's what lights up the eyes of the baker in the show I mentioned above. Sharing is what it's all about.

on weekends we be hermits

Saturdays are my favorite. We all sleep in and then I make everyone breakfast. Sometimes it's just eggs and toast, but sometimes we have pancakes and orange juice and bacon (or this super yummy orange caramel pecan french toast bake) so it's like a feast. We start our day sitting around the table together. Often, hubs and I have coffee and do a crossword or play a game together. Then I workout and take my dog for a walk. She much prefers sitting to walking, but she needs the exercise because she also really likes food. She's a lot like me.

Sometimes that's really the most we do and the rest of the day is full of games and movies. This last Saturday we were actually a bit productive and I trimmed the bushes outside our house while everyone else cleaned bathrooms. I didn't have the right kind of clippers, so the bushes were a beast to trim back to what you see here, which is not as neat as I would like. We'll have to get better trimmers before I can do anymore though. The best part: I got to listen to an audiobook while I did the work, which makes it seem less like work. Plus, I'm on a second run through of The Martian (SO great!) and hearing the intense physical labor the main character has to do just to survive made my bush trimming seem pretty easy. The second best part: I didn't have to clean the bathrooms.

That was not the end of our Amazing Saturday though! We took the kids outside in the evening to play frisbee. Two hours of running around for them! They are excellent frisbee throwers and catchers thanks to Chris showing them to do it properly. Our 8 year old is significantly better than I am, it's hardly even worth comparing.

Finally, we ended our day with silly snuggles on the couch and a show. Our munchkins are so fun, I love spending the day with them. That was a pretty busy Saturday for us.

I lay all this out for you to say this: I used to feel bad that we didn't get out more, accomplish more, do more on the weekends. Are we lazy? Should we be more adventurous? Are we ruining our children by not exposing them to more awesome things? Are we failures as adults? Truth be told, I don't know the answers to any of those questions. Maybe we are all of those things. Maybe we aren't adventurous enough. I decided something very important though: who cares? I love our weekends so much. I love that we eat breakfast, play board games and snuggle. I love that we don't care about doing All The Things. And I think our kids love it too. They get tired from the week and they like being at home as much as we do. If you love getting out and going on adventures (I'm looking at you JD) that's AWESOME and I applaud you. And you should get your hermit friends out occasionally because it's good for them. If you don't, embrace it! Drink coffee, snuggle in with your family and enjoy!

i think my couch is my best friend

It was sort of an accident you know. We moved this summer and we've spent the past few months settling in to a new life and new routines. As much as I didn't want to move, this one resulted in so many benefits for our family that I did not anticipate. The kids are all thriving in school and we spend a lot more time together. I am so grateful for how easily the kids adjusted and made friends. While we haven't found a church to get connected with, our neighborhood is very friendly and we are working towards friendships here.

I have felt pretty crummy lately though. Overall, things are going great with us. But on a day to day basis, I feel kind of useless. I thought it was just a chronic condition that I already knew about flaring up, but it went on for long enough that I finally went to my doctor to check it out. I am hopeful that they found a solution, a vitamin deficiency, and that the supplement will really help. By the time I saw the doctor, I was going on six weeks of spending my afternoons laying on the couch. I would get the kids to school and do a few things and then I just had to lay down. Looking around at all the things I wanted to do but having no energy to do them was frustrating. Thinking about the future and making plans that I wasn't sure I could execute was frustrating. Having a brain that felt like cotton was frustrating. And wanting to make friends and see people but feeling too overwhelmed by the effort that would take was defeating.

I am hopeful that over the next few weeks this will get better. There are a lot of days that I sit and list all the things I did that day (exercised, got the kids to school, made dinner, did yoga, etc.) so that I can remind myself that I did not actually spend the entire day on the couch. Just a couple hours in the middle. Over the past two years I have had days or a week or so like that, but never this long. It makes me appreciate, more than ever, the times when I feel good. And it certainly gives me a greater empathy for people who do deal with this for weeks and months at a time. Right now my couch might be my best friend, but it won't be like that forever.

i am not a food photographer...

...and this is not a food blog.

Don't get me wrong, I take pictures of my food all the time, probably too much. But I wouldn't call them photography. I will occasionally post some of those pictures here with links to recipes and note particularly good food combinations when I come across them.

I mostly take pictures when I've baked something new or that I'm particularly happy with or to share with a health and fitness accountability group I'm part of. I spent a lot of time struggling with food, self image and self control. Most of my adult life has been a struggle between wanting to eat all the chips, french fries and chocolate the world has to offer and wanting to be thin. I spent my teens and 20s thinking "if only." If only I was as thin as her, I would be that confident. If only I was thin, this dress would look better on me. If only I was thin, I wouldn't be so hot in the summer. (I really thought that last one guys! Summer after summer I would see women and assume they weren't sweating or uncomfortable in the heat because they weighed less than I did. It's so silly.) I've had a lot of "if only" moments in my life, and they weren't all about weight, but many of them were. It turns out if you have poor self image, losing weight doesn't instantly make you happier. At least it didn't for me. And it doesn't mean you now know how to eat well, have self control and be healthy.

Over time I've learned to actually like healthy food, have more appropriate portion sizes and proportion of veg to protein to carb. I found all that so difficult to work through and I had ups and downs for years. Of course I still have ups and downs, but the swings are so much smaller, and I don't beat myself up about it because that just never helps.

All that to say, I share pictures and ideas or descriptions of meals to these accountability groups to help people who are getting started on eating better. It's not an easy process and I am by no means an expert. Just a peer always working to feel better and hoping to share tips in the process.

let's try this again

If you create a blog and no one writes on it, does it still exist? Yes, because the internet saves everything. Which is, of course, both good and bad. If you start a blog and then don't write on it for almost four years, it's all still magically there! But if you post a picture on social media, four years later that's still there too.

I started this blog on a bit of a whim, with all these ideas of what I was going to do with my time and energy. Guys, I really thought I was on to something here. I had some clever ideas, I was working on some interesting projects, surely that would all come together. That's all you need, right? Ideas and projects! Nope.

When I ended up going in a different direction, it did not occur to me that I could post about it on my blog. I thought: "This blog is about art, and that's not really what I'm doing right now." And even more than that, I've again started something with gusto and then fizzled out. I fizzled out fast on this one.

This summer we moved from Colorado to Virginia. I was a pretty big baby about the whole thing to be honest. Once it was all said and done and the crummy bits of moving were over, it wasn't so bad. The area of Virginia we live in is really nice and the kiddos are thriving at their schools. The good thing about moving is that you get a fresh start. New people with no expectations, new opportunities and new routines. I knew Jonah needed that fresh start, I didn't realize I needed it too. We spend more time together as a family, eat more meals around the dinner table and laugh more. While Colorado was so good to us, we accumulated a lot of stress there. Moving allowed us to leave some of that behind. It also allowed me to take stock of where I was spending my time and redirect my energy. So I pulled this blog out of a dusty corner of the internet and decided to give myself another chance at a little writing.

This post took me an absurdly long time to write. Like, sitting for days staring at my computer long. "I'm trying to do this thing again" shouldn't be that difficult to say. Really, it's not. The hard part is saying "remember that blog I started and, like so many other things, didn't finish?" Well then, moving on...