Last Week
Last week I went to Sujeo, a new pan-Asian restaurant. Us three gals shared a hot pot, which is a big bowl of soup that cooks at your table. So good. We also had a variety of banchan, which are little Korean side dishes. My favorite was some sort of seaweed/seaside plant that was marinated to taste like meat, so interesting.
Sonny D got a very thorough haircut at the salon, she did a really good job. And we went to a surprise birthday party for a friend, it was nice to make the moment special for him and sweet that his wife wanted to surprise him.
On Saturday Sonny D and I drove two hours to the Dubuque area to hang out with my friend Renae. We shopped at the farmers' market to buy vegetables to roast for dinner. Then went to her house and made our plan of attack. We cleaned out her fridge and roasted whatever she had hanging out too long in the crisper drawer. I showed her how to make vegetable stock in the pressure cooker, rescued dinner by finishing the rice in the pressure cooker (rice cooker seemed to malfunction), and tried my hand at poaching eggs to go on top of our roasted dinner. We also cleaned out and reorganized her closet, which I had a lot of fun doing.
On Saturday Sonny D and I drove two hours to the Dubuque area to hang out with my friend Renae. We shopped at the farmers' market to buy vegetables to roast for dinner. Then went to her house and made our plan of attack. We cleaned out her fridge and roasted whatever she had hanging out too long in the crisper drawer. I showed her how to make vegetable stock in the pressure cooker, rescued dinner by finishing the rice in the pressure cooker (rice cooker seemed to malfunction), and tried my hand at poaching eggs to go on top of our roasted dinner. We also cleaned out and reorganized her closet, which I had a lot of fun doing.
On Thursday and Friday I started training for my new job as a taste tester. There were eight of us there this past week but one guy was missing because he was officiating a wedding. The training is really neat, we are tasting the reference flavors like sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami to become familiar with them. They come in different intensities ranging from nothing (0) all the way to the maximum (15). In addition to picking out the flavors, we'll learn to quantify their intensity levels (a sour 2 versus a sour 12). We also tasted examples of things like acidity and heat/burn. I also had a lot of fun checking out the company store, one of the other taste panelists and I explored what was available -- from lunch meat to snack nuts, to drink mixes and cheese. I bought an assortment of items including peanut butter, our favorite hot sauce, and lunch meat.
I'm still showing up at the gym for my weight lifting workout four times per week. In some ways I feel really weak with my 5 pound bicep curl, but also really proud that I have increased the amount of weight for my leg presses and shoulder shrugs.
We also got a new member of the family this weekend, Zipper the dog. We're still trying to determine if Zipper is actually house-trained since we discovered a couple accidents the first day, but they're also kind of a mystery since we don't know when they happened.
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| Our new doggie, Zipper. |
This Week
- Monday - Kung Pao shrimp with green beans and rice
- Tuesday - I forgot that grandma and grandpa are picking up Sonny D so on the menu I had a bag of frozen gnocchi and hot dogs, but I cant really think of anything better for just Jeff and I. It'll likely be that we eat whatever on our own. I've got Zumba class so I really don't eat much dinner on those nights since I don't want to be sick in the middle of class after all that jumping around. I'll probably have a hard-boiled egg and a piece of peanut butter toast.
- Wednesday - tuna kim bop and breakfast stuff (probably pancakes). Kim bop is the Korean version of sushi, last week my friend mentioned making it with canned tuna and I thought that might be something Sonny D might like.
- Thursday - Today is Sonny D's Halloween celebration at preschool and I'd love to see if I could make it there to help out but it's also my second week of work and the two times are pretty close to each other so I might have to skip the event and just go to training. For dinner I planned tacos but I haven't actually figured out if we have all of the proper ingredients, but I'm sure we'll make it happen with whatever we've got in the kitchen.
- Friday - Halloween and Sonny D's preschool has an inservice so he doesn't have school. With me not working full time anymore we figured things like this would be easy to handle, but I have to go to work so Husband Jeff is taking the day off to watch Sonny D (and Zipper!). Sonny D is going trick-or-treating with the family down the street and I need to have something yummy for dinner so he will actually eat it. I was thinking either broiled marinated fish or Shanghai fish stew.
- Saturday - Core Fusion in the morning, maybe a visit to Costco in the mid-day, then a small potluck dinner with friends that are in town and a few other people. I think I'm going to have hummus and crackers make creamy tomato-basil soup.
- Sunday - the Northside farmers' market moves inside and I'm excited to see how it will be. We'd really love it if the eggroll people came back since that was Sonny D's favorite thing at the market. In the afternoon I'm going to a friend's baby shower and so for dinner I figured I would go super-simple and reheat some 15-bean soup I stashed in the freezer.