Recipes lately and a meal-planning rut

I am 110% in a meal-planning rut. I jokingly say that this has gone on since I got pregnant.* Pre-pregnancy, I really enjoyed planning meals, cooking, baking...even the grocery shopping! As is documented on many years of this blog, food is a thing I like to make.

Somewhere in that first trimester a year and a half ago, even though I wasn't sick and wasn't tired and had generally no excuse, I just stopped with all of that. I just stopped caring about it. Something about it stopped appealing to me.

Fast forward to life with a newborn, I didn't care either. We ordered pizza at least once a week last summer/fall and now, living in a new house and a new state and having an almost-toddler crawling around, I still don't care.

I can count on one hand the number of times I've baked something in this house and we've lived here since the middle of January.

I do the Walmart pick-up for groceries. I hate taking two hours out of any given day to shop if I don't have to do it.

We like to eat generally healthy meals for dinner (my day-long habit of snacking is another story), so I just rotate through the same 5 to 10 meals. I'm being generous by estimating that as high as "10", by the way.

When I don't feel like cooking, I make a salad kit, roast some potatoes in olive oil, and make a piece of fish or salmon for Scott.

Either that or a salad kit and a frozen pizza (we like CPK pizzas), and this has become my Friday go-to.

When I do feel like cooking, I'll use that precious afternoon nap time to chop ingredients.

Sometimes I'll put something in the crockpot, but I always make sure I double the recipe so I can get two meals out of it (one to freeze), and that takes pre-planning.

It's not that I don't have time. I just don't prefer to use whatever time I DO have doing meal prep/planning/cooking.

So here's what I normally make these days...

+Some sort of healthified pasta. Like this Gnocchi Vegetable Skillet. Or I just make the veggie mixture and toss it with linguine or penne.

+A sheet pan meal. Chicken sausage, potatoes, broccoli, chickpeas, etc.

+Crockpot salsa chicken. I put it into quesadillas or over rice or quinoa.

+Chicken taco bowls. I make taco meat with ground chicken and add black beans and corn and chiles and eat it over rice or quinoa.

+Easy curries. Like this chicken one.

+In the winter, I did a lot of soups. I make enough to freeze so we can get 3 or 4 dinners out of it. Chicken tortilla is my favorite but I also make beef vegetable.

I think that might be about it, to be honest.

I started realizing I had a problem with this (and that it wasn't getting better post-baby) when Scott came home from work and said This is a nice surprise when he realized I'd actually made dinner because he'd be expecting a piece of salmon and a salad.

A change I've made from the past is that I do buy a lot of pre-made sides like wontons or veggies or sweet potato fries, just because I don't have time to make side dishes or extras, necessarily. Another change is that I really try to incorporate more than one vegetable in each dinner.

So.

Can you help? 

Seriously. I have no idea how to get this "I want to cook dinner" feeling back, but being able to add to my arsenal would be MORE than helpful right now.

What's your absolute favorite go-to dinner? 


*While we're talking about weird pre/post-pregnancy changes, I don't even care about chocolate anymore. Nothing about it seems to appeal to me. It's been that way for like a year and a half now.

An unintended break, Thanksgiving, and an *intended* break

Those two weeks went by fast. I had posts loosely planned for two weeks ago and last week. Then Wells had some vaccinations on the 13th and was really fussy, and maybe slightly feverish, for two days. So I couldn't get his 4-month update post together. Then, I admit, I felt a little bit of rebellious glee at the idea of not blogging. I also knew I would be in Colorado for Thanksgiving and there's no internet at that house so it seemed pointless.

So I don't know that I meant to take two weeks off, but I did. And if anything puts life into perspective about what you do and don't need, it's living out of a suitcase with a 4 month old for 5 days with limited LTE service. I checked Twitter a few times, Instagram once or twice, and then my email maybe once a day. It was nothing but sales emails for Black Friday and most from mailing lists I don't even remember signing up for.

I felt like I took more pictures than this over the last few days, but I must not have and here's what's worth sharing.

This sums it up. Scout, looking out the window, completely disinterested. Jett, as close to the baby as possible at all times. 

Also Jett.

Don't mind the dishes in the sink or the baby who wouldn't look at the camera. 

(Also, this is after getting up at 5am, driving 4 hours, unpacking allthethings, and cooking dinner, so I don't think I even noticed until justthissecond that my makeup completely melted off or something.)

He loves that table. I hauled it all the way to Colorado. 

It doubles as a high-chair at times. And Jett, waiting for his drippings/licks of rice cereal. 

I don't know if I mentioned it before, but my brother is also stationed in Colorado so he's gotten to see Wells more than once. He came over for Thanksgiving. 

Always chewing on a sleeve...

Part of the reason I went back for 5 days is because I had friends I wanted to see in case I don't get to see them over Christmas break. 

I was so glad Kylee finally got to meet Wells. She's the first person I told about him, face-to-face, way back in December of last year when I was 9 weeks pregnant.

Kylee and I taught five feet away from each other for 3 years. Literally, our desks were five feet apart, through an adjoining door. She was a first-year teacher when we met and we bonded over a love of Pepsi, Rose Gardner books, audiobooks in general, and The Bachelor. I would like to think that I gave her the support a new teacher needed but truthfully, after that first year, she did more for me than I ever did for her. She's done emergency sub plans for me, she closed out my classroom for me (including the dreaded end of the year checklist) when I had surgery the last week of school in 2017, and she's also been the only person I've trusted to watch my dogs overnight. I'd like to think I paid back the favors by having Scott fix her car a few times ha ha. 

Wells also got to meet my friend Kim and her kids, and hopefully I'll get a picture of them together over Christmas. Kim was the first person I met in Colorado at new teacher training waaaaay back in 2014. I wouldn't have made it through the last few years without her. 

All in all, when I add up the pluses in Colorado for me, those two are at the top of the list and it's not a terribly long list. Oh well. 

Onto the *intended* break part of the post...I'm going to be taking off from blogging, more or less, for the rest of 2018. I'm not too busy, it's not the baby, time isn't flying by too fast for me to write posts...I just figured it was time to take a break when I found myself wanting to write a diatribe about why I despise holiday gift guides on blogs. Instead of yelling about it, I'll just back off for a few weeks. I refuse to let my blog just fade away with the excuse of "life" or "busy", so I need to think about what I really want to share and what I don't. Other social media just doesn't float my boat the way blogging does, if that makes sense, so you'll never see me go to all-Instagram.

2016 was a hard year (a deployment year), 2017 was the year that I'm convinced broke me (almost everything that could've gone wrong that year, definitely went wrong), and 2018 has been harder mentally than any year I can remember. I just really need 2018 to be over so we can move on to what's next but in order to do that, I need to not rehash things on the internet because it forces me to think too much. I just want to go about life for awhile, and not worry about documentation.

I still have monthly baby updates to do and some book posts, as I've read a shocking amount of books in the last two weeks. But other than that, I'm not pressuring myself to post because I need a space between how things are and how I want to remember them, when we do leave this part of the country.

Or, who knows. Maybe I'll wake up next week and decide it's time to blog.

How Pinterest ruined my desire to bake

I used to bake a lot.  Cookies, bars, brownies, rice crispy treats, etc.  I understand that I've fallen out of this habit over the last year or so.  It was a hard habit to fall out of because I was so used to creating recipes and posting them here.  Eventually, with the time in Missouri, the move to Colorado, and the remodeling of a kitchen, I just gave up.

It's proven to be an even harder habit to fall back into though.  Once you stop doing something for awhile, picking it up again isn't easy.  It only takes 21 days to create a habit, they say.

Enter Pinterest.  I used to love it.  It was a wonderful time-waster and treasure trove of ideas and inspiration.  That's the same way I used to love food blogs.  Inspiration is what they gave me.  

However, Pinterest does this annoying thing where it follows people FOR you based on your previous pins or something, and so I end up looking at a million food pins.  What I've noticed is that food blogs have gone over the top these days.  Billions of ingredients in each recipe.  And these recipes either have completely unhealthy ingredients, like a soup with a stick of butter and cup of cream, or are on the vegan side of things, with hard-to-find ingredients.  While I prefer to fit more vegetables into my diet these days, I refuse to drive all over town looking for things when I know that I'm going to be too tired to make dinner most weeknights.  So I just stick to my standbys like sweet potatoes, quinoa, chicken salads, and so on during the week.  

And then there's the idea that more is more.  17 layers and 3 kinds of sugar?  That cookie must be much better than something classic and simple.  Or recipes with 3 different already-processed ingredients, such as pudding mix/cake mix/canned frosting?  Those kinds of desserts hold absolutely no appeal to me and that's all I'm seeing on Pinterest these days.  It seems like everyone is competing to have that next recipe post to go viral.  I realized long ago that none of mine ever would, so that might be when I stopped trying.  

I started posting recipes on this blog almost a year before I joined Pinterest.  I still joined Pinterest well before the general population and, let's face it, nothing is worse than the general population being on Pinterest. They tend to not know how to separate it from Facebook and all of a sudden you're scrolling through your newsfeed looking at Jell-O poke cakes and wondering what happened to your life.  And for the record, cooking chicken in a crockpot full of cream cheese and cream of mushroom soup is never a good idea.

In short, the inundation of over saturated photos,  the multitude of ingredients, and the "OMG SO GOOD" on blogs has ruined my desire to create in the kitchen because it's just too much.  Preparing food shouldn't be that complicated.

Do you have thoughts on this?

How I ended up with an Emily Ley planner

I went to school looking a bit like a yoga teacher yesterday.  It was just a professional development day and I spent all afternoon cleaning out my closet.  They're almost as casual here as they were in Alaska.  The sweatshirt is PSU UnderArmour and was on clearance.  I couldn't pass it up.  Just like the Emily Ley planner I now have…but the planner was definitely not on clearance.  

Last year, I was somehow directed to the Emily Ley website and I looked at their planners.  I was intrigued.  I already had my Erin Condren planner for the year but I was pulled in by the preppy design and beautiful layout of the Simplified Planner.

Obviously I didn't get one.  Besides, they were sold out.  I was almost amused by the fact that these planners sold out within weeks of going on sale.  Somehow I ended up on the mailing list (okay, I know how I ended up on the mailing list). I wondered what made them so special and expensive.

My Erin Condren planner ended over the summer so, for this year, I bought a $13 planner at Target back in June.  It's cute and all.

On September 1st, I got the notification email saying 2015 Emily Ley planners would be on sale September 3rd.

"That's nice", I thought.

On September 3rd, I just happened to be at a training where I was working on my personal laptop all day when I got the email saying they were officially ON SALE.

"Well, crap", I thought.

Before I knew it, I had ordered one.

When my coworker saw me ordering, she asked what it was and I explained.  Then she showed me her $7 planner.  She'd never heard of Emily Ley or Erin Condren.

"Yes, I used to be like you", I thought. "Then I got a blog and now I want new, shiny things all the time".

Thing that is both new and shiny.  Also, I can't make use of it for another 4 months..

What kind of planner do you have?

Facts

Fact:  How we punish the dog. He got in trouble for biting.  Next time, we zip up the top too.

 Fact: This is my favorite shirt.  I bought it on a street corner in Boston 3 years ago.  I always get asked if I went to Harvard when I wear it.  My favorite time (and I tweeted about it last year) was when I was in the PX buying a $5 bottle of moscato and someone asked me if I went to Harvard.  My immediate thought was, "I would not be an elementary teacher buying a $5 bottle of wine on a Saturday afternoon if I had gone to Harvard."

Fact: The humidity is evident on my camera lens.  This picture is edited within an inch of its life.

Shorts: Express (via Marshall's), Sweater: Macy's (old), Sandals: Old Navy

Fact: A search term from last week:  "side swept bangs on five head".

Awesome.

Also, "ryan gosling haircut".

I did one Ryan Gosling post a year and a half ago (one of those Hey, Teacher things) and every time I look at my search terms, his name is in there.  I've gotten used to seeing it, but perhaps the oddity of it has been lost on me.  That's REALLY weird.  Just thought I'd share.

Fact: 97 (NINETY-SEVEN) people have found my blog by searching "ryan gosling".  That is strange.

Fact:  I found this skirt tutorial that I'd forgotten about from last fall.  I'd wanted one.  But I can't sew.  Also, there are no fabric stores around here.  Scott is usually pretty busy.  I'm surrounded by roadblocks, as you can see.  I think, as soon as the flood waters subside, I'm going to make my way to a store (a real one), buy some fabric, and then beg Scott to help me.  Wish me luck.

Sharing at: WIWW, Random Wednesday, Walkabout Wednesday

funny stuffs 7/21

I have a great post for you about our weekend camping adventure...oh wait, I don't have it.  It disappeared when I tried to save it.  I thought too much of Blogger, I guess.  

Will do.

For those of you who wonder why we got a dog instead of a cat...

I don't necessarily trust cats..

Since many of you really liked the Ross gif last week....This is quite possibly my favorite scene from all ten seasons of Friends.  I share it also because we have dead armadillos laying all over the roads here.  It's unfortunate.  

But we can't forget about this..

Speaking of animals...

I'm spending an awful lot of time keeping flies out of our house these days.  

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Then, Courtney (who still needs her own blog) sent me this link and I could say that this sums up my feelings about things. For example, at the gym, it's not that I'm unable to do a real push-up..it's that I don't feel the need, and therefore do them on my knees.

When someone who's not me cooks in my kitchen, I pull a Milton and get super nervous, anxious, and possessive.

And lastly, this was me with a giant piece of 4-layer-chunky-chocolate-toffee-almond cake on Saturday. 

Happy Monday!...if Mondays are your thing (I'm sure there's a few of you out there.)

Sharing at Mingle Monday