Dairy Daze...and Now Beyond

  Most every Saturday evening I make two meals; one for that evening and one to serve for Sunday dinner.  This is for the simple reason that I don't want to come home from church and mess with making a full meal from scratch.  I used to make Sunday dinners in the crock pot, but I gave that up when I learned crock pots have lead in the glaze of the lining.  I used plastic crock pot liners for a time, but then there you have the plastic potentially leaching into your food.  So I changed my MO for Sunday dinner prep a few years back. Now on Saturday evenings I just fix two meals, more or less.  At least I fix two main courses, or proteins.  As long as I have the kitchen revved up to cook, it only takes a few minutes more to prepare another main dish.  I can bake two things in the oven.  Sometimes I will prepare a meat to marinate overnight and then cook it early Sunday morning, like ribs or a roast chicken, but for the most part I just cook Sund...

How does a week manage to get by me without a blog posted? I dunno. It's not like I don't have anything to blog about. I guess I must be wasting too much time on Facebook. Last week one of my best friends from high school found me on FB and we have been writing back and forth. We lost touch a year or so after we graduated and I was so happy to hear from her I nearly cried. It's kind of weird how we crossed paths. She spent 10 yrs w/ her hubby and kid in Las Vegas, and I spent 12 yrs in Portland OR. Now here I am out in MO and now she is in Vancouver WA working in Portland OR, in the justice system, same as I did. Kind of freaky. Anyway. On to cooking. One day last week I made this Thai Peanut stir fry recipe. I make it quite frequently, it's easy and good. But I used Italian meatballs in it instead of chicken. Then on Fri I wanted something quick to eat for lunch after I came home from shopping. So I heated up some of the leftovers of the stir-fry, wrapped...

This was going to be just one post, but I got bogged down with trying to tell everything all on one page, so I am going to make several posts out of my cooking stories. Here is the beginning: When you are 36 and have been a never-married bachelorette for so long, you don’t really prepare the meals, they just kind of happen; soups, sandwiches, fruit, cereal and milk…etc. I rarely ever ate out, but at the same time I didn’t ever see the point of preparing full meals for myself either. Sometimes I would fix a casserole and freeze most of it to be taken for lunches at work, but for the most part I didn’t bother much in the cooking department. Also, for much of the 12 years I was in Portland, OR I didn’t live where I had access to my own kitchen, I either had to share with a bunch of others, or I only had a microwave and a stove top burner. So when I got married back in the fall of ’04 I was pretty green in cooking to please myself, let alone someone else. I had visited my future in-la...