Weekly Eats: Steak Tacos, Take Out, and Life Lately

A weekly roundup: eats, watches, and reads.  Day in the life-ish edition

This is a typical scene from my work day right now.  Each day hubs and I set up shop in our upstairs office and stepdog comes in to supervise us.  As a boss, her number one priority is to keep us on schedule for her two regular daily walks and she's very good at her job.

Because I don't have to rush to get anywhere, I'm up an hour later than usual and have all the time in the world to eat breakfast and work out.  By the time I get home from my run, the other members of my family have started school and work.  I shower and get back into my jammies and start the work day. 

Apart from my wardrobe, work at home is pretty much identical to work in the office.  I'm an accountant, and as you might suspect I spend a fair amount of time buried in spreadsheets, but there's also a huge people component to my work.  Payroll is one of my main gigs, so I get to have lots of interesting conversations with people throughout the day. My airpods have gone from a "nice to have" indulgence to my #1 most valued piece of office equipment for the phone calls and video chats.

The mornings pass quickly and I finish up whatever I'm working on and then get dressed before heading downstairs for lunch.  I eat, and then head out with stepdog for a her first walk of the day.  If hubs can get away from work he comes with us, otherwise I listen to podcasts on the walk.  Then we're back home and I'm back upstairs for the second half of my workday.  While I rinse and repeat everything I did in the morning, hubs and the steps wind down work and school, I'm the last to finish work for the day (and also the last to start work for the day, so it evens out).  For the most part work is confined to work hours, I do get some Slack messages at night, but I'm finding that "hey is it OK if I get that for you tomorrow" is an effective way to set the boundaries.

Dinner time comes along and we do a rotation of freshly cooked meals and leftovers, and one takeout meal a week.  After that it's family dog walking time and then for the most part it's "do whatever you want time".  Some nights we hang out together, sometimes the adults and kids pair off, sometimes the four or us do our own things.  Screen time is liberally given. 

Apart from our dog walks, hubs and stepson #1 get out a few times a week to hike in the late afternoons.  If we need anything, they stop by the store on their way home.  I hardly ever leave, so far I'm on a perfect streak of only going to the grocery store once every 8 days.  And...I'm good with all of this. 

Do I want to stay home forever?  Probably not.  Do I sometimes worry about my parents or my FIL or the boys getting sick?  Of course.

Am I missing anything from the outside world?  Gotta say no.  It would be nice to have a family get together and pop open a bottle of wine with my SIL's but that's about the only thing that comes to mind on my to-do list.  Life is good.

There isn't much extra time except for all of the time that we used to spend rushing around everywhere, so I'm not exactly killing it in the free time department.  The only extracurricular activity that I've picked up is:

At one time I could solve up to a 5x5 cube from memory but those skills have gotten soft.  I can almost do the 3x3 from memory now.  Somehow I stopped playing the piano a few months ago and I keep meaning to pick that back up as well.

So the above is exactly why I write about food and running, the rest is interesting to me but just not that interesting...let's get back to regularly scheduled programming and talk about food.

Breakfast

Went back and forth between cheesy English muffins and breakfast burritos during the week.

Air fryer french toast on Saturday.

Lunches

Leftover pizza and tomato soup

Leftover steak from Sunday = tacos ==> thawed some Trader Joe's fire roasted pepper and onion mix and then put the pepper mix, steak, and cheese on the tortilla and put it in the air fryer for about a minute to get everything reheated, then added salsa and sour cream and rolled the tortillas and air fried it for a few more minutes to get the outside crisp.

And finally, the return of the Pinch of Yum Sofritas which I had for lunch on Sunday and will have for lunches this week.  What's the the bowl?  Leftover rice, my stash of roasted sweet potatoes, salad mix, sofritas, guac, and of course a few fritos to wash it down.

Dinners
Monday: baked ziti!  A dish that the adults in this house love and that kids in this house tolerate better than lasagna.

Tuesday: leftover ziti.  We learned the hard way that an 8x8 pan makes seven servings so that left us one person short of a meal.  I let the guys have it and dipped into the freezer for Sweet potato, black bean, and corn enchiladas.

Wednesday: I set my husband to work on the grill while I made mashed potatoes.

Thursday: leftovers night.  Hubs had chicken and mashed potatoes, I had another portion of the enchiladas, and the steps had frozen pizza.

Friday: our newly instituted weekly take out night.  It was the kids' first full week of online school so a treat was in order and we splurged for sushi (Ok, the sushi was for the boys and me, hubs was the odd man out and got a stir fry).

Saturday: hamburgers and fries!

Sunday: hybrid meal prep/leftover cleanout dinner.  I made the steps some marinated tofu in the air fryer to have with leftover rice, hubs had the last of his stir fry from Friday and I made a brand new batch of spinach artichoke pasta for myself.

Other stuff
Mid week I roasted up a bunch of sweet potatoes to keep in the freezer and made another batch of chocolate chip banana bread muffins.  For the muffins, we are out of canola oil, and I'm happy to report that avocado oil works just as well.

Grocery Store Report
I had a very brief trip on Saturday and everything was stocked up at normal levels.

Watching

• 🚨🚨🚨Good show alert🚨🚨🚨: Unorthodox on Netflix.  It's only 4 episodes long and I'm rationing myself to one episode a day.  I will for sure be reading the book afterwards.

• Yay!  There's another season of Married at First Sight on Hulu
• Family viewing was episode 1 of Sherlock, since stepson #2 is reading the stories.  The boys weren't into it at first but they wandered back toward the TV toward the end of the show.

Reading
Finished Bullet and now rereading an old favorite, The Far Country by Nevil Shute. If I was only allowed to own one book, this would be it.  I think I read it for the first time when I was 12 and can't begin to count how many times I've reread it, but it's been long enough that the story is fresh again.  Just sayin' the Kindle edition is 99 cents if anyone wants to join me;-)

Question of the week: if you could only own one book (in addition to a bible or other religious text of your choice, we're after the fun stuff here) what would be your pick?