Weekly Round Up: Something for Everyone

 

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  In this week's edition we tried a new dinner recipe and a new s'mores cookie recipe, a cybersecurity attack brought my family closer together, I got my booster, and we're watching Christmas movies.  There is truly something for everyone in this post. 

Let's start with dessert.  I made a batch of A Bountiful Kitchen's S'mores Cookies on Saturday night.  If we had to chose just one s'mores inspired recipe it would be a double batch of Averie Cooks S'mores Bars but these are a worthy addition to our collection.  The boys came up with the name shmookie to describe a s'mores cookie.

I think I've narrowed down my Christmas baking plans:

• Oreo balls (standard recipe one box of oreos plus one pack of cream cheese dipped in chocolate)
  
• Fully Loaded M&M Oreo Holiday Bars (I plan to double this which is pretty standard for all Avery Cooks desserts)
  
• Christmas Tree Shortbread Cookies (these will either be a wild success or a Pinterest fail...I'll let you know either way)

Speaking of projects that have a high likelihood of being Pinterest fails, I really wanted to make Smitten Kitchen's checkerboard cookies, but I couldn't find any red or green sanding sugar.  I'm bookmarking this here to revisit someday.

Now let me tell you about...

The Cybersecurity Attack That Brought Our Family Together

Have you heard about the log4j vulnerability?  It's a serious cybersecurity threat that has been the topic of many family discussions this week.

• It was discovered by Minecraft users (what my stepsons do in their spare time) 
• It's part of Java (what my husband does for a living)
• It was used in a ransomware attack on a major payroll company (what I do for a living)

I can't think of another world issue that all members of our family have been so interested in and that we all have expertise on.  And thank goodness that my husband just started a new job with a new project so he doesn't have to play Fix It and that my work doesn't use that payroll company, so it's something that we can just sit around and discuss for fun instead of having to be on the front lines for.

Eats

I pulled off a string of decent family dinners this week.

Monday: I took a chance on a new recipe, Skinny Taste's Quick Skillet Steak with Onions and Mushrooms.  My only quibble is that the recipe is touted as being 4 servings for half a pound of steak...uh not in my family.  I upped that to 1.25 pounds and when I make this again I will also increase the onions and mushrooms.  But that was my only complaint since everyone loved it and it was very fast and easy to make.

Tuesday: leftover lasagna from Sunday

Wednesday: a mac n'cheese night.  I'm working on finishing off the tortilla crusted tilapia that I got at Costco that I love and the rest of my family says is spicy, so I had tilapia and everyone else had chicken nuggets.

Thursday: Costco orange chicken and egg rolls.

Friday: standard issue pizza

Saturday: standard issue burger night

Sunday: we had a ton of leftover rice so it was a standard issue fried rice night.

Workouts

I had two clear fitness goals for the week: #1 get booster and #2 keep streak going if possible.  I got my boostie on Monday and my side effects this time around were much milder than the previous two shots.  I didn't have any brain fog (yay) and felt pretty decent just sitting around the house.  But I did have a bit of fatigue and had no energy on exertion so I reigned in the workouts. 

Monday: 4 treadmill miles easy, pre boostie.

Tuesday: one mile outside at lunch, felt pretty decent.  

Wednesday: was a super busy day, so I got outside as soon as daylight hit for my mile.  I felt very sluggish and tired.

Thursday: plan A was to get up dark and early, but I had trouble sleeping so I shut my alarm off in the middle of the night so that I could get some extra sleep.  I had just enough time for 3 miles so I stubbornly got them but between you and me my body wasn't ready for it yet.  I was painfully slow and it was quite the lesson in humility.

Friday: just about as good as new!  I limited myself to 4 miles just to make sure that I was really "back".

Saturday: I've said so many times how much I love running in the rain, but I have to qualify that by saying I love running in the rain only when the temp is over 45.  The needle was stuck on 30 and the rain kept up steadily over the day.  By mid afternoon I let the rain win and got 4 miles on the treaddy with the last quarter mile at a 5% incline.

Sunday: got my mile streak, and I was feeling frisky so I upped the pace and did an extra quarter mile.

Watching

From the treadmill: I didn't have a plan in place for what I was going to watch after Sunset Blvd, so I found myself searching for anything that looked good and came up with Top Hat.  I'm going to detour from AFI top 100 movies and spend some more time in Fred and Ginger land.

From the couch: I went looking for a TV show and came up with When Heroes Fly.  It's an Israeli show (same star as Shtisel which is why it popped up on my Netflix) about four friends who served in the military together but had a major falling out after being ambushed on their last night in the service and each in their own way suffering from PTSD.  Ten years later word comes that that one of their friends, who was the sister of one of the men and the girlfriend of another, who was presumed killed in a car accident is alive and they reunite to search for her.

With the fam: it's Christmas season.  So far we've seen A Charlie Brown Christmas and Die Hard.  When hubs fired up Die Hard on Friday both of the boys were "busy" but within 10 minutes they were on the couch with us with their electronics down so it was quite the Christmas miracle.

Reads

I stayed up late on Monday to finish A Million Things by Emily Spurr and I cannot recommend it highly enough.  From there my next move was to The Paper Palace which is showing up on a lot of people's "Best Books" lists.  So far I like it but I'm not obsessed with it.