Eat Like A Caveman: Stuffed Peppers with Breaded Squash

This afternoon, I wandered into the kitchen on a mission to make dinner.  I had an eggplant in the fridge and I wasn't afraid to use it.

Until I cut it open, that is.  I do not have a vast well of knowledge in regards to cooking eggplant, but I'm fairly certain it's not supposed to be brown and spongy in the middle.  So I was forced to improvise, and this is what I came up with.

Oh dear heaven.

The squash was not exactly an improvisation.  I've been cooking summer squash (and zucchini) like that a lot lately.  It's super-easy and delicious and more satisfying than a plain vegetable of a similar portion size.  The stuffed peppers, however, were completely thrown together with things I had in the fridge.  Nothing unusual in there, but they are so tasty.

For the peppers:

1 lb ground beef  (haha, I just typed "beaf." That was weird.)
1 onion, chopped
minced garlic in an amount you find appealing
olive oil
salt and pepper
1 can drained diced tomatoes OR a few fresh tomatoes if you've managed to get your lazy behind to the farmer's market anytime in the last couple weeks (I haven't)
1 can tomato paste
various fresh or dried herbs with an Italian slant (I was feeling braindead so I just used a handful of fresh basil from the patio pot.  In retrospect it could have also used some parsley, oregano, thyme and/or sage.)
 up to 4 pretty-colored bell peppers (only stuff one pepper per person, unless you have piggy guests)

Throw the beaf (haha) into a medium-hot pan with the onions, garlic, and a glug of olive oil.  Stir up the meat until it's thoroughly browned and crumbled up.  If it seems a little wet, drain it.  If you used 96/4 like me (or if you used bison like an even more awesome person), you probably won't need to.  Add the salt and pepper, tomato, tomato paste, and the herbs, and simmer for a few minutes.  Taste and adjust the seasoning if you feel like it.

Just a note:  this is the most basic of all basic tomato sauces.  It can be adapted to fit a thousand applications.  It is nothing earth-shattering.  My apologies if you were bored stupid and now wish to throw boogers at me for being so lame as to put a plain old tomato sauce recipe on my blog.

MOVING ON.

Take those pretty-colored bell peppers and slice them in half vertically.  Pull out the veins and seeds, but for God's sake leave the stem on.  Peppers are so pedestrian, they need all the aesthetic help they can get.  Slice that stem in half with the rest of the pepper and all of a sudden you have ART.  Rub a bit of olive oil on the cut edges of the pepper, and rub some oil into the bottom of a glass baking dish.  Bonus points if the dish is pretty, too.  Fill each pepper half with the meatsauce (there will probably be some left over; save it for more peppers, or put it on spaghetti squash, or just eat it with a spoon like Jason did when he got home because he was flipping starving and couldn't wait for dinner) and plop the whole assembly into a 350-degree oven for 20-25 minutes.  The peppers should come out nice and hot but not exactly cooked.  You want there to be some crunch still.

You know how to further elevate it from "dinner" to "ART?"  Stick a tiny freaking basil leaf on it.

GENIUS.

  
Now that breaded squash.  It's not bread at all.  It's almond flour. To make it:

1 medium yellow squash or zucchini, cut into large dice
1/2 tbsp butter
salt and pepper
1/4 cup almond flour
garlic powder

Melt the butter in a medium-hot pan (normally I'm indifferent about cooking surface but this really wants something non-stick, whether it's teflon or well-seasoned cast iron or whatever you use).  Cook the squash for about 5 minutes, giving it a sprinkle of salt and pepper.  Scatter half the almond flour over the veggies, along with some more salt and pepper and a dusting of garlic powder.  Toss to coat (stirring just doesn't work, sorry).  Scatter the rest of the almond flour; toss it again.  Turn up the heat a few degrees; we want to crisp up the breading a bit, but we don't want to burn it.  Keep tossing the squash every 30 seconds or so; try to make sure it turns so each side gets browned.  Serve it nice and hot and try not to stuff it all in your mouth at once because it is DELICIOUS.

And I leave you with this artistic shot of some admittedly poorly-browned breaded squash.

It's not really browned.  It's really just kind of beiged.

Just a little stitch

Before anyone says anything, I do not participate in the use of mind-altering substances.  I never have, I never will, no I'm not lying.  But I had this turn of phrase pop into my head a few weeks ago and I couldn't let it go.  I cracked up every time I thought of it.  I can't help it.  Puns amuse me like you wouldn't believe.  It surely can't be normal.  But I digress.  Here's a pun!  There's even a voice that goes along with it!  (It sounds a lot like Towelie, if you're curious.)

I had to stitch it.  Every now and then I get crazy-inspired to do a bit of embroidery.  My technique is kind of "eh," but whatever.  I do it because it's fun.  I knocked this off in just a couple hours while Jason was watching the Women's World Cup and doing computery stuff.

I'll shut up and just show you the stitches.

Two steaks.  They are high.  The steaks are high.  You see what I did thar?

Extreme close-up!

I love this little guy.  He's so adorably stoned.

I didn't mean for him to be wonk-eyed, but it worked so I left it.

And now it's out of my head and on a piece of muslin, so I can let it go already. 

Back to your regularly scheduled programming.

A Matter of Perspective

I've been back on the running pony for some weeks now, slowly building mileage and making sure I don't fall off.  As I keep saying, I'm not a runner, but I want to be!  It's just that sometimes I'm... shall we say... less than enthusiastic about doing the work involved in becoming a runner.  It would be kind of awesome if I could wake up tomorrow and be like "Hey sweetie, I'm going to join you on your thirteen mile run, and YOU'RE GOING DOWN."  But no... tomorrow's going to be a mile-and-a-half slog at a searing 10:15 pace.  The best consolation is the bacon waiting patiently in the fridge.

Anyway, where was I?  Oh right, perspective.  Jason left the house at 5:30 this morning to whip out his 11 miles before work.  (Yeah.  He runs more in a day than I run in a whole week.  He's amazing and I love him.)  I'd asked him to poke me before he left so I could get up and do my run before breakfast.  So he did (well, he didn't literally poke me, because that would be rude and unboyfriendlike), and I got up after silently whining  for fifteen minutes or so.

Ate a banana, drank some water, got into my running clothes (as much as running annoys me sometimes, I love the clothes), and sat on the couch.  And sat on the couch.  And sat on the couch.  I just kept thinking, "Gotta run two miles... don't wanna.  One mile away, then one mile back.  Gotta, but don't wanna.  Don't wanna.  MAAAAAAHHHHHH" 

And then I thought about the lady who lives in our subdivision.  If I had to guess, I'd say she's in her mid to late 40's, and is a very dedicated runner.  She's not very fast (like I'm one to talk about fast), but she's out there like clockwork, at sunrise, almost every day.  And the interesting thing is that it seems like the bulk of her running is on the long oval drive at the back of our subdivision.  And I thought... I don't want to run a mile away and a mile back... but I could do laps!  Yes!  Laps are doable today! 

Whatever gets you out the door, amirite?  Anyway, I'd wasted so much time whinging on the couch that it was 6:48 by the time I got out the door.  That's a lot later than I like.  According to my Garmin, the oval is around four tenths of a mile, so five laps would give me my two miles.  I actually ran into Jason on his way home, and his smile is always a boost.  So that was nice.  He was in the shower by the time I got home, but I still got some breakfast cooked before he came downstairs.  (I like to be helpful in the mornings.  Having his breakfast ready is the least I can do.)  And now I've earned the right to be a slug the rest of the day.  Yay!

So there you have it.  Perspective.  Two miles seemed like a lot this morning.  But since I was able to break it up into manageable chunks, it didn't seem like such a wall.  I don't even care that it was a boring run and I didn't get to see any turtles.  Boring is a minor issue when you don't want to do it anyway. 

I bet I don't do laps tomorrow, though.

A Quilt for The Littlest Russell

Two of my friends are having their first babies--both are having girls, and the two babies are due within a few days of each other.  They are the first of my "grown-up" friends to produce offspring, so these little kittens are going to be spoiled rotten, and yours truly is more than happy to help with the spoilage.

We just held a shower for one of the girls today, and naturally I had to go nuts with the quilting.  I've worked on this blanket pretty much non-stop for the last couple weeks and just finished it up this morning.

I present to you--a purple and green quilt.

This one shows the color.  It's not perfect but it's close.

And this one shows the texture.  Vive la hand-quilting!

It's machine-pieced, hand-quilted and -bound.  I do not like machine quilting.  Like, at all.  I don't like the way it looks, I don't like the way it affects the drape, I kind of think of it as cheating... I just don't like it.  So, hand quilting it is.  I'm kind of a traditionalist that way.  Someday I'll have a magnum opus of a hand-pieced, hand-quilted monster, but I'm cool with machine piecing for now.  But NO MACHINE QUILTING.

Where was I?  Oh!  More details.  The binding is scrappy (yay for using up yardage!), the backing is a solid piece of unbleached muslin (the better to show off my quilting [I refuse to be modest on this topic {I mean, I'm still a quilting noob and it looks pretty dang good if you ask me}]), and it runs a hair short of 45" square.  I'm really pleased with the texture, but I think next time I'll try a different batting.  I used an 80/20 cotton/poly blend, and it's just a little too lofty for my taste.  I think in the future I'll stick with 100% cotton, or the cotton/bamboo blend I used on my sister's quilt. 

The whole thing was a learning experience (first time sewing bias-edged pieces), and while it's good, it's not show quality.  I did okay on the places where four corners meet...

Semi-gratuitous texture shot.  Yum.  I like dense quilting.

See?  Not bad, not bad at all...

On the places where eight corners meet, however, my results were a bit hit-or-miss.

Hit!

 

Miss.

Big miss.  Blech.

But I'm really, really pleased with how the binding turned out.  It's a French-fold binding, both for durability and because it seemed the easiest way (no raw edges to harass me!).  The corners are kind of good-not-great, but I learned a lot and they'll be better next time.  And it turns out that while I haaaaaaate hemming, quilt binding is very soothing and meditative.  Loved that process, really.

What?  You want to see more of that gorgeous backing with the quilting and everything?

OH WHAT THE HELL, I GUESS SO.

Seriously, I am really, really happy with how the quilting turned out.  It's mostly free-handed, too.  Go me!  (Sorry.  Modesty failure again.)

This whole experience just made me happy.  The small size meant it wasn't a huge time commitment, and it's been nice to get a break from the bed-sized quilt I'm making for Sis (which just needs to be bound!  The quilting is d-o-n-e DONE!), and the colors are so cheerful, it was honestly hard to put it down (which might have also been the fact that I had one week to quilt the bitch).

It was very well-received by the mom-to-be (which I expected; she's a little crafty herself so she understands and appreciates the work involved).  I'm happy she's happy, and I can't wait to make the next one!

I'M SORRY I'M SORRY I'M SORRY

I have been so very neglectful lately.  Okay, more than just lately.  But work was all busy, and then I couldn't run, and work was still busy, and I started to get end-of-season-itis and work was STILL busy and then my season ended and I spent a couple weeks decompressing and I did a lot of crafting and I'm starting to run again even though it's HOT and I really don't have any excuse not to write anymore.  So I'll tell you a story about a recent run.

Jason gets up very early to run before work in the summer, and I've been heading out the door around the same time (usually a bit later, since I don't put in near the mileage that he does, but still quite early).  It's typically around sunrise, so I get to see a lot of wildlife that tends to hide itself away as the day heats up and the humans get out and about.  I don't usually get to see any big animals like deer (although Jason once spotted a coyote on a frozen pond), but there are lots of different kinds of birds, and bunnies all over the place, and little frogs and toads when you get into the woods.  And because our running trails are built along the local floodway (which is another post for another day), there are lots of ponds and creeks, which equals a startling number of turtles.

A few weeks ago Jason found a little turtle the size of a nickel, far away from water and getting dangerously dry.  He carried it a quarter-mile to the pond down the trail and let it go in the mud near the edge.  It soaked up some water, then swam away.  That is just one small example of how awesome Jason is.  There's no way the little turtle could have made it all that way on its own.

My turtle spotting was not quite so adorable.  I was nearing my turn-around point on the hill near our house (which I swear is the only hill in Plainfield), when down the trail I noticed a big lump of some kind.  The trail is right next to the road there, and I assumed it was roadkill.  As I got closer, however, I realized--nope, not roadkill.  Snapping turtle.  A big one.

It was about nine inches across, just sitting smack in the middle of the path.  There's a small stream of some sort that runs right under the road there, so I assume that's where it came from, but I wouldn't have expected such shallow water to provide enough food for a snapper that big.  We did have a wetter-than-normal spring, though, so maybe it had just traveled. 

ANYWAY.  It was big, and it looked like it was headed toward the road.  Not only is that path on a hill, but it also comes around a curve, so if a car came along while the turtle was crossing, it would definitely be turned into turtle hash.  I'm a country kid, and I know you can't pick up a snapper.  They're too aggressive and kind of scary.  So I decided to squirt it in the face with my water bottle and annoy it back off the path.

It didn't like that one bit.

It went from "oh, don't mind me, I'm just a big ugly bastard hanging out here with my head in my shell" to "I AM GOING TO EAT YOUR FACE" in less than half a second.  It was so fast, we might have actually time-traveled backwards a second or two.  I was standing a safe distance away and I still jumped back a bit.

But my mission was accomplished; I ran into Jason on my way back (not literally) and warned him about the turtle.  After he got home he said the turtle had moved back into the brush on the side of the trail. 

He also wondered why it was all wet, so far from the water. 

I Don't Know What To Call This One. It's Mostly Going To Be About Sewing.

Yeah.  That's the best I could do.

A couple weeks ago, my sister called me out on the quilt that I stalled on.  "So... Cooper ate our comforter.  How's that quilt coming along?  Not that it's any hurry or anything, we've just been sleeping under a comforter with its guts spilling out."  Cooper's a dog, in case you were curious.  I had to admit that the quilt pieces were cut out... and some of them were sewn together... not very many of them, but some of them....

And I started feeling bad.  Since work has calmed down in the last couple weeks, I decided to get to work and stop being such a lazy bum.  It helps that the weather hasn't been very conducive to outdoor excursions lately.

Yeah, that's about three inches of water standing in our claypit.  I mean our backyard.  And a shovel and hose that have been there since September. 

See?  Gloom and doom.  And cops!  They were doing driving drills in the rain.  They do driving drills pretty much every day.  They also have target practice every day.  Living next to the police academy is AWESOME.

Anyway, so I managed to get my two-square pieces sewn into strips today.  I wanted to get the top completely assembled today, but I didn't have quite enough time.  Plus I got bored with it.

I dislike this ironing board.  It is the third I have gone through.  I KNOW WHAT I WANT AND I CAN'T AFFORD IT.

Isn't my sewing corner the adorablest?  PS those are not my real sewing shears.  My real shears rock much harder.

Here's a funny story.  When I was cutting out pieces, I carefully stacked them into 9 piles of 8 pieces for each color.  As I reached the end of my yardage, I started to worry.  I was pretty sure I was going to run out of the red stripey stuff.  It seemed wrong, since I'd had enough of the green and I purchased the same amount of each, but maybe I did something weird along the way.  And sure enough, I came to the end of the piece and found myself three squares short.  Whatever, I'm smart, so I decided to pull some scraps out of the trash and cobble them together into squares.  I did a good job matching up the stripes, and I don't think they'll be all that noticeable when the quilt is all finished.

Oh yeah, go MacGyver!

So I'm puttering along, happily sewing away and matching seams like a boss, and when I get toward the bottom of my two-square stacks, I notice something funny.  A few of the red-stripey stacks had extras!

EXACTLY THREE OF THEM HAD EXTRAS.

MacGyver or MacGruber?  I AM AWESOME.  Ugh.  And yeah, I'm totally leaving the MacGrubered pieces in place.  One, because it's a funny story, and two, because I am not a perfectionist.  It's 3 squares out of 144.  That's, like, 2 percent.  98% is still an A.

And then this happened.

Oh, no.  Ohhhh, no no no...

OHHHHH, YES!!!

And it was awesome.

The end.

Hey look, a creeping kid!

Creeping back in from a little absence.  Work has calmed down for a few weeks, we're barreling to a close for the season (although it looks as if I'll be working a few weeks longer than originally planned, which is fine), I'm working (and not working) on some crafty things, and I've gone full-on Paleo.

WHAAAAAT?!

I know.  I've become one of those ridiculous girls who has to do all the same things her boyfriend does.  Horrible.  Disgusting.  I'm an independent woman, right?  Well, yes.  I am.  Which means I have the right to do whatever I want.  If he asks me if I want to run a half-marathon (which he did ask, a couple months after we met), and I want to try it (which I did), that's cool.  He has never once pushed me into anything.  And as it happens, even this die-hard "NOT AN ATHLETE" really, really likes running once it becomes a habit.  My ankle is still effed, which means I haven't been running since you last heard of me, but the difference is that I want  to be running.  And since he's gone Paleo and had such mind-blowing results (at 36, he weighs the least he's weighed in his adult life, and he just keeps running faster and faster), I've been curious to try.  So I took the plunge a couple weeks ago, and it's been basically amazing.

It helps that I've kind of been easing into it for the last few months.  Since Jason and I live together, any meal I've eaten at home has more-or-less fit the Paleo/Primal profile.  No grains, no legumes, no (or very, very little) dairy, and no refined sugars.  Once you kind of change the way you think about food and what constitutes a "meal," it's not hard.  You do have to go grocery shopping on a regular basis (and by that I mean "three times a week"), but that's not a hardship once you start seeing the results of an improved diet.  And you have to cook.  You just do.  If you don't know your way around the kitchen, believe me, you will learn, and quickly.

So!  In two weeks (or three?  I can't remember when I jumped in all the way) I've lost ten pounds, and I'm very close to being the lightest I've been in my adult life (I sense a theme here).  My belly is noticeably flatter.  I sleep better.  My skin is better (it wasn't bad to begin with, but it's not as dry).  I don't get the shakes when I get hungry anymore.  In fact, I don't get as hungry as I used to.  It seems like a normal-sized meal is more satisfying than it used to be.  And it occurred to me, my weather-induced headaches seem to be less frequent, and less severe when they do happen.  Dunno how that relates to diet, but it does seem like there may be a connection.

And any diet that gives you leave to eat meat at every meal?  YES PLEASE.