Happy Monday!

Happy Monday people! Get ready for a completely scatter brained blog post. I thought I would give you the gift of a new blog post for the beginning of the week. This week is big - I am rediscovering self-discipline and early mornings in preparation for the prospect of starting work next week. The past couple months have been wonderful and restful but they have completely gone against my nature of being an early morning riser. Growing up I was known to get up at 5 am before school.... why you ask? well to watch Saved By the Bell and Gilligan's Island of course! This tendency for early morning productivity has not left me since (I don't know that I would call getting up early to watch tv productive...). So this week I am getting back into the routine of being a productive member of society. This weekend I planned meals, chopped up and prepared all of the veggies for the week, made lunches, cleaned, and planned exercise classes to attend. The first time I have fully planned out a week in a lllllooooooooong time.

Let's stop here for just a second and let me share one of the most life changing conveniences that I discovered this weekend -- online grocery shopping - yes that's right. While watching football on Saturday I went from aisle to aisle of a grocery store with just a click of the mouse. I could compare prices on the items that I wanted, see my total go up, and delete anything in the basket we didn't really need. Let me just say it was magical! Then on Sunday, voila! A nice man named Chuck rings our doorbell and there are our groceries with a complimentary apple pie! Alright now back to being productive.

This morning I went the gym with the full intentions of attending a spin class..... but the spin class was full and so I ended up in Zumba. Love it.... in my room alone, but this was a room full of women with an instructor who may as well have been J Lo. Let's just say things didn't go down pretty.

I have fallen out of the habit of cooking full meals, so in celebration of making a full meal, here is what we ate Sunday



Salad (lettuce from the CSA farm), with pears (from pear picking!), golden raisins, candied walnuts, and goat cheese
Roasted potato slices and carrots (also from CSA farm)
Balsamic Pork Chops with shallots

Foodgawker Please

We are nearing the end of the week and I still have many-a-CSA veggie to cook before we get our next batch tomorrow. We have sweet bell peppers, sweet chile peppers, tomatoes and onions galore. Now what to do with all of these colorful lovelies? The hubs doesn't consider a meal a meal unless it is centered around some sort of meat..... so that leaves me with a dilemma. I have a selection of meats in the freezer but am not so sure what to do with them. Foodgawker had some interesting suggestions when I searched "Chicken peppers."


Chicken Rug.... no big deal




Any suggestions are welcome!

Shoulder Pads and Kale - A day of many firsts

Shoulder pads..... check
Resume.....check
Suit......check
Pearls.....check
Terrified....probably

Today was the first day for me to physically go look for my first real job. Sure, I have been surfing the web for months now, from the safety of my couch, sending my resume out into the lost abyss of the internet, but today was a real search. I dressed up, went to offices, knocked on doors, and in a twenty second intro, tried to make myself unforgettable. Hoping it worked.

Today was also the first day I have ever eaten kale. In an effort to add more greens to our diet, we bought a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) share. Basically every week we will get a box of veggies from a local farm for a set price for the entire season (One day I would like to have our own huge garden, but apartment dwelling isn't conducive to much more than an herb garden). It ends up being a great deal at about 10$ a week for a ton of food. Most shares are for a family of 4-5 so we are splitting the box and the price with our neighbors. The only catch is, whatever crops they bring you that week is what you get, so you can't be a picky vegetable eater.... which there are at least a couple of those at our house.

This week after splitting with the neighbors, we got:

1.5 lbs of potatoes - (Hudson wants me to make some cheesy mashed potatoes.... I need to get on that)
1.5 lbs of green bell peppers - (sliced it up and ate it as a snack with some hummus)
1 head of lettuce - (ate some for lunch today in a salad)
2 heads of raddicio - can someone please tell me what to do with this! I tastes pretty bitter
1.5 lbs of broccoli -(roasted it and put in a pasta)
1 garlic bulb -(used it in the pasta)
1 pint of cherry tomatoes -(yet to use slash kind of ruined them when I turned the fridge to cold for Hurricane Irene.... and a coke exploded....)
1 bunch of kale - (Kale chips)

We ate a bunch of the broccoli on Friday night, roasting it in the oven with the pressed garlic, salt, and olive oil. I am not a fan of raw broccoli and this was SOOOoo good. We made a broccoli parmesan lemon pasta and it was pretty darn good if I do say so myself. Hudson even liked it! But tonight was a whole different monster.... KALE..... duh duh duh (said in an increasingly deeper tone). The difficulty with this whole veggie thing is that Hudson and I have completely different palettes. Example A: Tonight while we were in the kitchen working on dinner, I was preparing the kale and I turn around to see Hudson sprinkling left over ground beef on the frozen pepperoni pizza. Case and point. Back to the Kale. On foodgawker, 80% of the kale recipes came back as kale chips. So kale chip it I did. And it was pretty good. I think Hudson found the creepy seaweed color creepy, and he refused to eat it with his eyes closed. So... I don't know if I would call the kale a success.



Help please:
1. What do I do with Radiccio?
2. Any other uses for Kale?