Journal

2024 - Thanksgiving Menu Plan

Task List Done, Equipment list done.

Appetizers

  • Carrots, Celery, Cornichons - Prep Tuesday

  • Cheese and Meat Board (Cheese Shop) pickup Wednesday

  • Gus Soda (already have)

  • Crackers, variety

Bread

  • Rolls from La Mie (Wednesday Early)

Mains

Desserts

  • Brown Butter Apple Crumble - Pickup Wednesday (Pie Bird Pies)

  • Pumpkin Cream Cheese Hand Pies - Pickup Wednesday (Pie Bird Pies)

  • Cinnamon Ice Cream - Pickup Sunday (Pints by Beth)

  • Vanilla Bean Ice Cream - Pickup Sunday (Pints by Beth)

2024 - Week 47 Cooking

I was really planning on making Barbacoa Lamb tacos this week, and if we did not have plans Saturday night. I have a recipe from ATK, but also one from one of the digital cookbooks I bought based on an interview I heard somewhere, and they seem fairly similar. Anyways that will probably be the week after Thanksgiving.

2024 - Week 46 Cooking Results

Sausage

A nice thing to have.

Taco Salad

Good things.

Green Curry Chicken with Green Beans

Delayed! I brought home pizza instead.

Corn Chowder

The weather wasn’t really cooperating as to when both fresh corn was around and the right temperature was ready for soup. I used frozen corn. I added a bit more celery and another potato and went from there. It was a pretty good soup. Just a touch of bacon, and cooked in the bacon fat. Ate the last of the leftovers this morning for breakfast.

Skillet Pastitsio

While this is not quite as good as the full blown version, but as a weeknight version? Pretty good. It does bring back thoughts of making it for someone else and their family which makes me a bit sad. Still a good meal.

2024 - Week 45 Cooking Results

This week has been exhausting. I took multiple anti-acids early in the week because my level of anxiety was so high that I just couldn’t pay attention to the world around me. We went and saw the movie Election on Tuesday night. I am on the strongest level of prescribed acid reducer, already, so this is not a common experience. My anxiety appears to have been justified,while I spent the rest of the week, and now, in a general funk. I guess people would rather be lied to and blame their problems on others, then care about the people around them and actually try to solve problems. I have deleted a number of podcasts recently because I really don’t want to listen to people blame storm.

Sausage

All pork skinless brats from Crooked Gap. Good things

Meatloaf (Minor Adjustments)

I used green onion sausage (1 pound) and ground pork (2 pounds), but the rest remained about the same. This is always a good meal, I also made some mashed potatoes to go with them. I spent quite a bit of time eating meatloaf sandwiches, which was quite good.

Buttermilk Pancakes

These are always quite a good thing.

Pumpkin-Gochujang Pasta

So I sort of doubled this, however, that didn’t make sense, I should have doubled the pasta and only done half again of the sauce. So it was kind of too saucy. Overall, not to bad, but just kind of a mess.

Tangy Chili Pork Noodles

Made before, made again, skipped the chili crunch, as I shouldn’t be eating things with small seeds. Good things.

2024 - Week 44 Cooking Results

Sausage

Back to thee wonderfulness that is Crooked Gap & Grade A Garlic brats.

Pork Burgers

Bacon and pork combined into patties from Crooked Gap. Not the first time we’ve had them, nor will it be the last.

Turkey and Bean Chili

I used fresh onions and peppers, added an extra can of beans and tomatoes. Swapped chili powder with chipotle powder. With all that, it was a good dish.

Thai Chicken Soup

Skipped the mushrooms, as Shannon is not usually a fan, I had to make a special trip to get lemongrass, since the ones I had became a bit to woody. I followed the rest of it pretty closely, filtering the broth. With the added items of scallions and serrano peppers, it made for a good soup again.

Meatloaf (Minor Adjustments)

Delayed until Sunday.

Buttermilk Pancakes

Also Delayed. As a note, my favorite buttermilk, Kalona, was no longer available at the Hy-Vee I go to. However I was able to pickup some at my local food coop.

The Second City's 65th Anniversary Tour - Temple Theater - 11/1/2024

After getting dinner at Lucky Lotus, for the first time in a while, we eventually headed downtown to go to this. Admittedly it is quite convenient to eat at one of the downtown places, but in this case, I wanted something else.

We had trouble finding a spot, so ended up parking on the other side of the block (behind the central library). We were running a bit late because of the parking issues, so we rushed our way in, got in a very busy line for the drinks (mostly water) and got seated by a cute older couple at table 2.

The show, which included skits, some improve, and some general silliness was quite fun. It was an enjoyable break to all the things going on.

2024 - Week 43 Cooking Results

Sausage

We had a smoked pork sausage from The Good Butcher, and it was quite nice.

Smoked Chorizo Tacos

I wasn’t exactly sure what to do with smoked chorizo, which was one of the other sausages that I got from The Good Butcher, but this seemed fitting. The Smoked chorizo infused the beans and onions that I combined them with a nice mildly smoky flavor. This was a pretty simple thing to put together.

Chicken Jambalaya

I made this last night, which was pretty easy to do. The combination of the water and the rice makes me think that they wanted to get a lot of starch out of the rice but I’m not totally sure, I should probably read the article. Boiling the 3 quarts of water took the longest. Even though I had Andouille Sausage in the freezer, I used the one I picked up at The Good Butcher, rather then the chicken one they had called for. I had everything else before the rice finished cooking. That being said, it still turned out quite good. I added a bit of Lola’s to it and was quite happy.

Macaroni and Beef

I used mass market ground beef, for this, rather than defrosting some beef. Since I planned on making it Sunday after seeing back to the future and I wouldn’t have time to defrost beef (I don’t like doing a forced defrost, just a nice gentle slow defrost in the fridge). I used the whole pound of noodles and adjusted as I saw fit, which made something probably a bit different. Still good though.

On the home front, we had to escalate some home repairs from yeah we should do this, to this must be done ASAP. The one segment of the electrical panel melted and created a bit of a fire. This was related to the split breaker that powered both the bathroom upstairs and the family room in the basement, where I work from. After getting electricians out to check on things, they moved the wires from the fried breaker to the garage breaker and stated that they were not sure how long this would last.

We put in temporary rules to make sure that we don’t overload that breaker, and so far, so good. There is a heavy duty cord, that I had used for the window unit air conditioner, in the past, and Shannon runs that from something on the main circuit through our bedroom and into the bathroom to use here high energy devices. We’ve shut down most non-essential things in the living room (extra work laptop)

to prepare for replacing our electrical panel, our exhaust flue for the water heater was moved to be further away from the panel. The fine electricians did a double check after my photos to make sure that everything was ok, and now we are ready when our energy company is ready. This should be quite the update, and I’m looking forward to having something that is labeled correctly, and not having a panel that has been stated by multiple electricians as “those are untrustworthy”.