Hibernation Weekend

I have a friend that likes to say that she hibernates during the winter; she watches a lot of DVDs, takes naps, reads and basically turns into a homebody when she isn't at work. I'd say that that "hibernation" was a good way to describe my weekend. On Saturday morning, my phone woke me from a dream about cooking pasta as I was saying "there are some days when I wonder if I'm wasting my life in an office." That's something I've been thinking about a lot lately but that's for another post.

R picked me up to do some grocery shopping on Saturday; a new MOM's Organic Market just opened up and I wanted to check it out. R likes grocery shopping with me because I usually know some recipe that uses some ingredient that she's never seen. Then I get all excited because they sell bulk tofu. I picked up some bulk green split peas and yellow popcorn (I wish I could find other popcorn varietals locally). Everything was shiny and new but it's a smaller store than the David's Natural Market on the way home from work so there was much less selection. I had hoped to pick up some bulk almonds but they only had raw and tamari almonds, I wanted some unsalted roasted ones.

Then we went to Aldi's. R is still building her pantry so she got some spices and canned tomato products. I picked up ingredients to make meat loaf and salad for dinner. I'm not a huge fan of canned and processed foods but I love shopping at Aldi's. The quality is good and prices are even better. There are some canned products that I keep in my pantry for "emergencies": canned mushrooms (they're a quick and easy way addition to spaghetti sauce), corned beef (nuke a couple of potatoes, slice up some round onion and add an egg to fry up some corned beef hash patties), baked beans (add some yellow mustard, brown sugar and Vienna sausage then serve over rice), Vienna sausage (for baked beans or with breakfast), corn (usually purchased from Wegmans because they offer a salt free variety), and of course SPAM. There's some other things but I don't want to go through the list today.

But the end result of this story is that I made meatloaf, salad and rice for dinner last night after spending the better part of the day on the couch watching Netflix with R. And I repeated the process today while DBF had his friends over. Tonight's dinner was fresh corned beef (as opposed to from a can), potatoes, carrot and cabbage. DBF had purchased some corned beef while it was on sale last year and we needed to eat them before the sales start up next month.

It occurs to me that it'll be difficult to have a cooking blog if I'm not cooking...I'll need to work on that. I also need to work on getting some photos posted here.

Be Excellent to Each Other! - KP