Weekly Eats: Book Flight

 

A weekly round up: eats, watches, and reads.  This was a hot week on the TV and reading front, so let's skim through the eats so we can get to the good stuff.

Breakfasts

Clif bars and such.

Lunches

During the week  I feasted off of my stash of air fried tempeh, cole slaw mix, rice, roasted sweet potatoes, guac with some chips on the side.

On the weekend, I switched over to Cheap Lazy Vegan's 15 minute stir fry.  As a cheap and lazy non-vegan, I used a bunch of Costco stir fry veggies and topped it with wonton strips and fried onions.  I just want to emphasize again how good and easy this recipe is.

Dinners

Monday: we started the week without a plan.  Hubs stepped up for dinner duty.

Tuesday: work disaster day, I have no clue what my family ate and no memory of what/if I ate.  We all got through it.

Wednesday: the boys went out with their mom and hubs and I did "fend for yourself" with leftovers.

Thursday: Whew, things calmed down and I had time to cook.  Budget Byte's Weeknight Pasta.

Friday: Date Night 1 of 2.  We went to the drive in hamburger place.

Saturday: Date Night 2 of 2. Takeout from the Lebanese place.

Sunday: I busted out the Instant Pot and whipped up a round of Barbacoa Beef

Watching

I am sad to say that I finished The Queen's Gambit...sad because it was very good and I will miss it.  Also sad because for some reason I thought there were 10 episodes but there are only 7 so it was over sooner than I expected it to be.

Next up: season 5 of The Line of Duty.  If you haven't heard of it, you might have heard of another show by the same production team called The Bodyguard that was all the rage on Netflix a few years ago.  Seasons 1-4 have been on streaming forever (a.k.a the sites that we have such as Hulu and Amazon Prime) but I could never find season 5 until recently.  Well, well, turns out it's on Hoopla (free site from the library that I recently learned about).

It's a terrific show, but it's intense.  I'll be taking this slow, partly to make it last and partly because I can't handle more than one episode a night.

Reading

I ended up with an unplanned literary book flight.  Which is to say I encountered two beautiful books on the same theme, though sadly not a happy theme.  Not pleasure reading, but they can't all be beach reads.  It doesn't sound right to say "hey I read two really good books about domestic violence, check 'em out!" but so let's try "I read two incredible books about an important topic".

Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey is a memoir about the author's mother who was killed by her stepfather (another way to think of this book is as the unfunny version of Born a Crime...both books start with the premise that the mother was shot by the stepfather, though spoiler the two books have very different endings).  She did an incredible job of giving her mother a voice.

Saving Ruby King by Catherine Adel West is a book that everyone on the planet has read, which also centers around domestic violence.  Incredible writing, impressive handling of multiple narrators/timelines, and "OMG did not see that coming" twist at the end.

My general thing is to listen to non-fiction and read fiction, so I was listening to Memorial on audio during the day and reading Ruby at night.

Currently: The Last Flight by Julie Clark.  Which is also about domestic violence, though something tells me the wife is going to come out OK, so it doesn't quite fit in with the rest of the "flight".  This one makes me feel like I'm on the beach and I can't wait to get back to it.