Sunday, October 31, 2010

It's been a month and a half...

It's been ages since I last posted, but at least I have an excuse!

Wedding planning and a honeymoon take up a lot of time.

But while we were on our honeymoon, we both picked up pairs of Vibram's Mocs. They're like leather gloves for your feet. We're both wearing them daily now - soooo comfortable! I don't think they'll last long, unfortunately; Vibram suggests using them indoors, and we wear ours outside quite a bit. I've already had to use a little Shoe Goo to reattach the sole in one spot. But we'll see, they also look easy to repair.

By the way, eating paleoish is pretty difficult when you're eating out constantly, and you can't really cook in a hotel room that only has a mini-fridge. I mostly gave up on paleo while we were away, and as a result I gained about 8 pounds (half of which I've lost again since - I think the remaining four are baby) and felt worse than usual. It's nice being back and cooking again. Now I have to go through the carb crash again, though. Not fun.

Speaking of cooking, got some recipes for you today.

Recently we made meatloaf using this recipe. Substitutions: 1/2 cup almond meal and 1/2 cup grated parmesan instead of the bread crumbs. We also didn't have any onion, bell pepper, or tomato paste, but we used some dried onion and a little (a couple teaspoons) ketchup instead, forgoing the extra tomato on top. Oh, and we added more bacon on top of course - all woven together. It came out awesome, and was fantastically filling.

Then we got sandwich steak from our meat share (more about that in a minute.) It's little pieces of steak, sliced for sandwiches, in little rounds. We sauteed some onions and mushrooms in just a little cream until tender, sauteed the (salted and peppered) steak slices lightly in that, and layered it all onto steamed cabbage leaves to make little cabbage wraps. They didn't look very appetizing, but they were pretty tasty. I'm not sure the cream was necessary though, and next time I'll add more spices.

Today we spent a lot of time preserving things. We got a lot of apples in our CSA yesterday, and today we made 4 and a half quarts of applesauce, nicely jarred for future use. We also froze 5 pounds of blanched french-fry cut potatoes while still having a pound of home fries to go with dinner.

Along with the apples and potatoes we got a purple cabbage, a dozen potatoes, two dozen eggs, rainbow chard, broccoli, an acorn squash, a butternut squash, cauliflower and brussel sprouts. I've always hated brussel sprouts, so we're going to have to experiment with different ways of cooking them. They're basically little cabbages so maybe I can hide them in the cabbage somehow.

Unfortunately this was our last week of the summer veggie share. We're definitely going to continue it next summer, though; we still have lots of veggies in our freezer and pantry to eat for a while, and I love the variety without having to go shopping.

We also signed up for the winter share, which we get to pick up every two weeks. Apparently it's going to include more apples, eggs, squashes, things grown in their greenhouse, and cheeses. I'm excited to see what we get, and it continues all winter. We also signed up for the meat share like I mentioned. It's expensive, but the meat is all pastured and antibiotic-free, and we get a large variety of cuts. Yesterday we picked up 30 pounds (we'll get 25 pounds each month), in 12 different cuts of beef and pork - including pastured bacon! Expensive, yes; worth it, hopefully. The quality of the meat will help a lot. The DelMonico steak I'm eating now for dinner is really tasty! At the very least we'll be shopping around for cheaper meat shares if we decide this one's too expensive. The small chest freezer, though, is already proving it's worth.

Anyway, this post is getting long. Back to handing out candy (anybody have ideas for a healthier alternative for these kids?) and finishing my dinner between visitors.

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