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Happy November!

In celebration of pretty much nothing, this was the setting for dinner tonight:

Yep, candlelight. With wine (Riesling), cloth napkins, and cupcakes for dessert.  Fancy, huh? Dinner was leftover homemade minestrone soup from this weekend that I have failed to get any pictures of.

We also did a load of laundry, a sink full of dishes, and cleaned the kitchen counters.  Somehow, the bedroom and living room are also both pretty clean.  I’m not sure what is going on here, but it feels wonderfully relaxing.

Here is some other fun from the weekend.

Pumpkin carving on Friday night with two spectacularly fun friends. Mine is the house with the ginkgo leaves and Matt’s is the tiny pumpkin with the crooked smile, square nose and gigantic round eyes.

Sunday night dinner spent waiting for trick-or-treaters (we eventually got a few later in the evening).  Shepherd’s pie with a stew base made from ground pork and lots of veggies, topped with mashed sweet potatoes.  With a side salad and bread (not pictured).  Finished off with a fun punch (also not pictured) and dessert of Gale Gand’s “Perfect Yellow Cupcake” with butter cream frosting (both from my stand mixer!) and a yummy homemade pumpkin pie.

The end of October/beginning of November has been very good to us.  Not least of all because my long recruiting trips for work are over and the cold weather means Santana has been extra cuddly.

Happy Fall!  Now it’s time for Thanksgiving planning!

Where Have I Been??

Yeah…I disappeared.  But really, it was only for 6 months or so.  How much could have happened in that time, right??

Well….

We moved into a new house! We have surprisingly few pictures of it…but it’s wonderful!  We have three bedrooms, a gorgeous and light-filled living area, a fully fenced backyard and a 10 minute drive to work for me!

We bought a shiny new car! Matt’s lease on our Honda was up, and I wasn’t particularly fond of it.  The Mazda 3 is lovely, sporty, and took us on a super fun road trip to Portland for Matt’s birthday…

     

And to a Seattle Sounders game!

We have cooked…and eaten…a LOT!  The following pictures only make up a couple months (if that) of the last half a year.  It has been delicious.

   

Need to know what any of those are?  Ask me and I’ll try to figure it out…I have been pretty lazy about keeping track of things we cook lately.  Included above…a vegetable chickpea curry with paneer, pumpkin lasagne rolls, seared scallops, bean and corn tortilla “pizza”, roasted corn tilapia, homemade Cincinnati-style chili (!!!!) on top of Cook’s Illustrated-style hash browns with eggs and cheese for breakfast, ham dinner for Easter, coconut crusted something….it was all really spectacular. 

I went on an amazingly relaxing celebratory cruise

   

with this lovely new Doctor of Veterinary Medicine:

We cruised in the Bahamas for 5 days, maybe?  In honor of Veronica’s graduation from vet school and my newly-engaged status, we escaped from everything for a few days and got caught up on each other from the last four years.  We need this more often. 

Oh…there was also the small matter of this:

Complete, spectacular happiness.  It turns out planning a small wedding for family and a tiny handful of close friends is a shit ton of work.  Who knew?  Also, we were in NC, so there was sweet tea, chik-fil-a and actual summer weather (we have seen very little of that in Seattle this year)! It all turned out to be really fabulous…with the help of an unbelievably adorable and excited mom, a maid of honor/best girlfriend who kicked butt on the actual wedding day, a lovely lawyer/online-ordained minister friend who helped us create the perfect ceremony, very excited Seattle friends who were more than happy to help me plan all of the details in the middle of the work day, and of course a partner who was really eager to help and smart enough to stay out of the way when necessary. 

Any wedding-planning friends out there, it is so so worth it. Even though there were several points during the weekend when I turned to Matt and said “the next time we get married, we are not doing it this way at all!”  Mr. Wonderful Ross kept me sane through the whole process by saying things like “This is your day! You can’t do it wrong! Your job is to be beautiful and everything else will be perfect! You need to learn to delegate!” My one piece of wedding advice…find someone to tell you these things constantly!

   

I’m back on the road for work again soon and without wedding planning looming over me, I promise I will try to be more bloggy. 

Meat-Free Mal & Matt?

Matt and I are experimenting.  Our lunches are pretty much the same thing throughout the week—he takes a sandwich or a wrap with deli meat along with a snack of some sort, I take leftovers from the weekend.  On the weekends we like to indulge in lots of meat…for example, this past weekend we managed to eat two meats that come from a pig, one that comes from a cow, and one that comes from a bird.  It was delicious, but also very overwhelming.  It will make for wonderful leftover lunches throughout the week, and I had a wonderful time cooking up some new recipes and some old favorites.  However, meat can be expensive…especially if you are trying to purchase meat of any decent quality…and I find that the more meat we put in a dish, the less veggies we end up consuming during the meal. 

With our CSA box coming every other week and random cravings for vegetables lately, we came to the conclusion that we’d try to take our Monday-Friday dinners meat-free.  We made it through week one and are just starting week two.  The first week was pretty easy, since we had a crockpot full of sweet potato soup leftover to start us off on Monday, and we went out for Thai on Tuesday (Thai is one of the easiest cuisines to go meat free with).  Thursday, our planned risotto was a bust when I was off my feet with a lingering back pain and really just wanted a big plate of stir fried veggies…Buddhist Tofu from the Chinese place across the street it was (so delicious and simple!). 

However, I imagine it will get a little more challenging in the coming weeks.  To prepare for this, we started a list of things that we love that can easily be meat free. We have a long list already…and most of the things so far didn’t even come off of that list! One stipulation: we aren’t going to make meaty things with meat-like products….the point of this experiment is for us to eat more veggies, not to eat more fake meat.

This is a dish we actually made a couple weeks ago, but I just realized that it’s not one that’s on our list…adding it now!  I first made this before Christmas for a couple friends and it might be the new favorite Italian dish in my repertoire.   Special thanks to our Kentucky friends Bob & Shannon, who sent us two jars of homemade marinara sauce.  AMAZING.  We still have one left because I want to save it as long as possible.  We shot through the first one with this dish and then a mini-meatball sub and salad dinner a couple nights later. 

Zucchini Parm for Two

• 1 large zucchini sliced lengthwise into four strips
• 2 Tb flour
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1/2 cup seasoned breadcrumbs
• marinara sauce
• a handful of your favorite italian cheese

1. Heat 1/4 inch vegetable oil in a deep pot over medium heat
2. Bread each slice of zucchini by dusting in flour, dipping in egg white and then dredging in breadcrumbs (you could also use cornmeal and it would probably be amazing)
3. Fry in hot oil, about 2-4 minutes per side, depending on heat of oil and thickness of zucchini.  Flip when crust in deep brown in color.
4. Drain on paper towels.
5. Place zucchini slices in a small baking dish in one layer.
6. Top with marinara and cheese.
7. Broil or bake until sauce and cheese are hot and bubbly.

I served with roasted broccoli and shallots and some orzo tossed in some additional marinara (which I was eating right out of the pan while waiting for the zucchini to fry…very classy).

This is ridiculously easy and made a fun and easy dish to serve to company.

Love it.

It’s officially fall…

I am on the road.  Insanely on the road.  Next week I actually get to be in the office for the whole week, but other than that I’m spending most of my time out of town until Thanksgiving.  Fun and new places, but exhausting!

Even though I have a bit more time while I’m on the road to write, the preparation for the travel has made blog food scarce.  We’ve been relying on a lot of old standby meals, leftovers from the freezer, and way too much restaurant food.  We’ve also done some crazy travelling as we’ve moved from summer into fall….including our trip to North Carolina, during which Santana stayed at PetSmart.  The very next weekend we zoomed down to Berkeley for a wedding, which Santana can also fill you in on.  Both were a bit quick and chaotic, but really fun and relaxing.  I loved being able to have a couple trips with Matt to just relax and enjoy our time together without work craziness getting in the way.

In better food news, since fall has definitely set in, it is crock pot weather for sure!  We actually used the Crockpot a decent amount during the summer, but fall means lots of soups, stews and chili…plus lots of leftovers to restock our freezer!

We said goodbye to the summer with a light meal that lasted us through two dinners and 1 lunch for me.  Tomato bacon quiche (which we had frozen from a couple months ago) with a spinach honey mustard salad and some lightly salted Kettle chips.  We were both huge huge fans of this meal, which is why it was repeated twice…usually we make some changes, switch up the side dishes, etc.  This time the same meal found its way to our plates two nights in a row.  So delicious and satisfying.  And a nice light end to the summer.  Bonus: homemade garlic croutons!

 

To welcome in the fall, we made a vegetarian chili cornbread casserole that completely outdid itself as a shared dish at a potluck, dinner for us at home, and is lasting Matt through this week while I’m out of town.  To make the chili, I mixed 4 or 5 cans of black and pinto beans (1 can of beans got mashed up) in the Crockpot with sautéed onion, green bell pepper and garlic.  I also added some spices, hot sauce and a can of green chilies.  Two cans of diced tomatoes rounded out the liquid in the pot and it cooked all day on high, bubbling away. 

I poured the cooked chili into two casserole dishes and topped each one with the batter for this cornbread with the addition of some shredded cheese to the mix.  They baked for about 40 minutes or so and then one went to the potluck, while the other chilled in the fridge, waiting for us the next day.

For our leftovers, we covered the 2nd casserole and popped it back in the oven to reheat.  While that was cooking a tossed some fresh broccoli with a tiny bit of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper and garlic powder.  Into the oven it went to roast away.  It got crazy crispy and had a tiny zing from the balsamic.  Really wonderful.

The other star of the potluck and our leftovers was a fruit cobbler with fresh plums, pluots and nectarines, frozen blackberries, and a whole wheat cobbler crust.  Served with vanilla ice cream, obviously. 🙂

 

Meanwhile, Santana’s meals have remained pretty steady.  Because of her allergies and anxiety, she gets Benadryl and Pepcid before dinner.  Since she is so fussy, she gets the wonderful treat of having her meds wrapped in peanut butter (freshly ground peanuts from Whole Foods….Matt and I don’t even get this fancy for ourselves!). She follows this up with some dry food which must be amazing because she gobbles it down like a fiend.  What a gourmand.

 

A Wonderful New Blog (and Giveaway!)

For any of you who love any of the following things:

1. Books/reading
2. Hilarious up-and-coming writers
3. Young Adult literature
4. Shenanigans
5. Free stuff!

One of my good friends, Corey, has started a site called Twin Pigeon.  I lived with Corey in my freshman year of Undergrad in KY and we spent a lot of time goofing around, eating wonderful college food and talking about music/books/movies.  Corey is hilarious…there is really no other way to describe her in a nutshell.  I am always thrilled when I see an email pop up in my inbox from her because it is full of goodness.  She got me hooked on the Twilight series, and I’m not sure if I should thank or curse her for that.  It’s too late now though, so we just spend a lot of time making stupid jokes about how many times the word “chagrin” is used in the series. 

In case you missed the subtle hints above, Corey is big into Young Adult fiction.  I am not as well-versed as she is, but I love it! For me, between semesters in an English BA (followed by more semesters in an English MA) program, something like Twilight is just what I needed.  YA novels tend to suck you in like no other (except maybe Picoult?) and get you to love characters who have a good chance of being ridiculously annoying and will probably make horrible decisions repeatedly throughout the book.  It’s awesome.

Another wonderful thing to know about Corey:  she had a KICKASS wedding…I was a super-helpful bridesmaid, dressed all in red.  We marched up the aisles of the KY theater for a dark and wonderfully romantic ceremony on the stage with a delicious reception full of movie-themed goodies all around.  Yet another reason she is great.  Does this make you want to visit her new blog???

ANYWAY, Twin Pigeon is currently mostly about reviewing YA books…it’s just getting started, so send her some love/suggestions/harsh criticism/knee-slapping jokes about vampires/whatever.  BUT to start things off on a blogger-friendly note, Corey is giving away a book!  A FREE BOOK! This one is a brand new, hardback, just released, fresh off the presses, exciting work of literary wonderment. You all know how contests work, so click your way over and enter Corey’s contest and explore her quickly growing site 🙂

PS.
Corey, WOOO!