Steve's Birthday and Week in Review

Hmm...blogging more than once per week is turning out to be easier said than done.  I suppose that if this blog covered more than cooking, like my workouts and restaurant experiences, I'd have more to blog about.  As it turns out, last week's sambhar plus some other leftovers carried me into the middle of the week, so I quit cooking for a while so I could dispense with the leftovers.  By Thursday, I was getting too busy to cook again, so I actually ate frozen dinners, like, three nights in a row.  By Friday I decided that I was sick of frozen and I wanted to cook, so I skipped yoga in order to stay home and replay the sweet potato spinach praram.  Excellent fuel for the 10-mile run I did on Saturday morning!

For Saturday's lunch, I borrowed this recipe for garlic greens and white beans (pictured above) to finish off a big bag of kale but substituted black-eyed peas for the white beans because that's what I had in the cupboard.  And Romano cheese instead of the Parmesan, not that there's much difference between the two.


I didn't cook again over the weekend because we had ample lunch leftovers and we dined out on Saturday, Sunday and Monday for our birthday weekend - my birthday was yesterday, and Steve's is today.  So...I cooked for Steve and presented a couple of options for which I had already grocery shopped.  Steve's preference was the Chinese hot pots, so that's what I made.  The only deviations from this recipe were that I made it vegetarian (skipped the chicken pieces and used Better than Bouillon vegetable base instead of chicken broth) and made about a third of this recipe, since I didn't know how well any leftover rice stick noodles would keep.  I also added broccoli and cilantro as recommended in this spicy Thai soup recipe.  It turned out well, and for having over a dozen ingredients, it came together pretty fast.  Which was good, since we were both hungry early this evening.

Soon to come...more seasonal veggie goodness!