Failure! :D

Actually, today was anything but. Except for the candied pummelo peel which just ended up soggy and sweet. I think the heat was too low.

But dinner was a smashing success, though even if I use the recipe again, it won't be the same. Even if I make the same corn-for-half-the-beans substitution, it won't be the same. Since I was doing a double-layer of enchiladas in a loaf pan, I needed a sauce, and used some leftover sauce/liquid from stuffed peppers earlier in the week, mixed with a packet of taco seasoning. Curse my ingenuity, and using available resources!

Dinner has been great all week. Stuffed peppers, food-loaf, meat loaf... plus banana bread. I love my loaf pan, don't I? (note: meat loaf was made with a pie plate) Until tonight, everything was decided by the seat of my pants, using what was available and needed to be cooked.

Now I have a new method: Google calendar as meal planning.
In general, I stay on the lookout for good potential recipes. If it's in a book, I'll fold the corner. If it's on the internet, I'll tag it on a favorites site. Don't know what I'll do with a recipe from another source.
Keeping in mind the rhythm of our schedule, what we have on hand, what needs to be used, and frequency of different starches and proteins, I skim folded corners and saved links until I see something that sounds promising, then add it to my calendar. Internet recipes have their full text pasted as the event details, with the recipe's URL in the "where" field. This way, when I need to make a shopping list, I have an easy place to look for what we need for the next few days.

I'm on day 2 of this method. So far so good.

But after nearly a week of our new normal, I'm foreseeing one major problem: I'm cooking too much food.

Four dinners and one loaf of banana bread into the week, plus soup planned tomorrow, our fridge stocked with fresh food is becoming a fridge stocked with leftovers, with no sign of letting up. Tomorrow's dinner is soup, thankfully, which freezes well, but I had to revoke Reagan's authorization to make curry over the weekend so we could have time to deplete the surplus of leftovers and reclaim some of the tupperware that's tied up in the icebox.

My life is so hard. :P

Really. I had to forcibly detain myself from starting scones for breakfast tomorrow (in order to use up some berries before they go bad.


Other notes that don't fit the rest of this post:

+ Pummelos are dangerously good. They're the pomegranate of the citrus family.
+ I managed to cook, draw, and write today, plus a pinch of yoga AND got out of the house. I rock.
+ Tomorrow I'm going to leave the house and take my car with me to run errands!