Weekly Round Up: An Easter Comedy

 

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  This week I bring you the comedy of our Easter family dinner.

Eats - Easter

We usually host our big family Easter brunch.  This year we did an Easter "brinner" on Saturday night because the other in laws had priortiy on the SILs for Sunday morning.

 

The "divide and conquer" menu:

• ham and a double batch of mini quiches by hubs and me (sidebar: yes the link is to broccoli mini quiche - that's just a loose guide to what I do.  I use 1.5 cups of milk instead of evaporated milk and 6 slices of bacon instead of broccoli.  Apart from those two changes I follow the recipe exactly lol)
  
• fruit and cheesy potato casserole by SIL#4
• an epic spinach salad, french toast casserole, cinnamon rolls, and cottage pudding by SIL#3 (she felt like making a bunch of stuff and the rest of us said "DO IT!!!!")
  

The comedy part:

• For some reason I have it in my head that quiche uses a lot of eggs, which it does not.  I got a pack of two dozen eggs from Costco...the doubled recipe uses 6 eggs.  I mean it's fine because we eat a lot of eggs in this house, but awkward to have the massive Costco packaging in the fridge.
  
• For some reason hubs had it in his head that dinner was on Sunday and not Saturday, so it threw off the entire cadence of his weekend.  He was so confused!
• For some reason hubs and I both forget that ham takes way longer than the advertised time to cook in spite of many years of Easter recaps on the blog where EVERY SINGLE YEAR THE HAM TAKES FOREVER TO COOK.  NOTE TO US: START IT AN HOUR EARLIER THAN WE THINK WE NEED TO NEXT YEAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Anyhoo, we had a delightful evening with the fam.  We had a good amount of leftover quiche and of course GALLONS of ham.  On Sunday I made a half batch of this cheesy potato casserole so that we had something to round out the meal with.  We'll eat ham dinners for as long as the casserole lasts and then I'll parcel it away in the freezer and bring it back in quiche.

For me the stars of the show were the cinnamon rolls (had not had one in forever) and the spinach salad.  I'm in the process of tracking down the dressing recipe so that I can go on a spinach salad bender.

Eats - Non-Easter

 

I have not forgotten the epic Thai tofu salad that I had in Buffalo a few weeks ago.  Since I can't just hop up to Buffalo on a whim, I took a shot at recreating it at home.  

• I googled Thai salad dressings.  Most were peanut butter based, and I knew that the salad that I'd had was not.  Fed & Fit's Thai Asian Salad Dressing seemed like it could be close, so I made a double batch.
• I chopped up a block of tofu and marinated it in the dressing overnight and then air fried it at 360 for 20 minutes.
• I mixed up a bunch of salad, edamame, juilenned carrot, dressing, and topped it with the tofu and some cashews (P.S. I am certain that the original used Trader Joe's Thai lime and chili cashews).

Obviously my homemade shot was nowhere close to the original but it was the next best thing.

I've been wanting to try Cheap Lazy Vegan's Teriyaki eggplant and mushroom stir fry, so that was my next project.

 

You need to know that I'm not a mushroom connoisseur.  99 times out of 100 I just use white button mushrooms, mostly because the exotic mushrooms at the regular grocery store are expensive and always look a bit suspect.  That was my original plan, but the grocery store didn't have any eggplant so used it as an excuse to hit up the Asian market.  Their 3-pack of King Oysters was about what I'd expect to spend on white button 'shrooms, so I went for it.

The recipe calls for half and eggplant and 2 King Oysters, so I decided that two small eggplant plus 3 King Oysters was a double recipe and scaled up the sauce.  I added in the remainder of a bag of frozen fried tofu and netted four servings out of it.  Thumbs up!

 

I very much liked the taste of the King Oysters.  It's a subtle, "different" kind of mushroom taste BUT once I added the sauce they're kind of like any other mushroom.  All I'm saying is that if this sounds like something you'd like to try I think that white button 'shrooms would be just as good as the Kings.

Workouts

Not a lot to say.  I blinked and suddenly I'm halfway through Iron.

Watching

I finished season 1 of The Jennifer Coolidge Show (ok, ok, fine I guess everyone else calls it The White Lotus but whatever) and put a good dent into season 2.  What can I say besides it's entertaining and all of the actors are fabulous?

Reading

I'm still tearing up the pages!  Buckle up and I'll get you up to speed:

• I finished The 100 Years of Lenni and Margo. Similar to Crying in H Mart this is a qualified rave==>a book with two terminally ill protagonists is not a book for everyone.
• Thing one: I started crying at the 90% mark and had a good cathartic sob afterwards.
• Thing two: this is possibly the best book that I've read so far this year unless you make me choose between this and The Social Climber. 
• I raided Kyria's 2022 booklist again for my next read.  I think I've heard a couple of recommendations for These Silent Woods but Kyria was the most recent.  It's about a man who lives out in the woods with his young daughter and life is great except that his nearest neighbor is always poking his nose into their business.  As he tells the story, the reader picks up that there's something going on besides that he likes living off the grid.  One day they find footprints on their property and shortly after that they end up with a house guest and I'll leave it there for you to pick up if this sounds like something you'd be interested in.  
• Good book, definitely recommend
• The present day part of the story "we live in the woods and it's great but whose footprints are those" was razor tight, but the flashbacks to his army life, the girl's mother, and the thing that got them into the woods kinda dragged for me and I skimmed those parts.  That's why I was able to get through the book so quickly.
• My library hold for A Brave and Lovely Woman came in.  This is a biography of Mamah Borthwick, better known from the novel Loving Frank (aka the lady who left her husband to run off with Frank Lloyd Wright and has one heck of a story to tell).
• Good things: that this book exists at all, since its subject is undeservedly obscure.  I love that it was written by a distant relative.
• Bad things: it's a tall order to write a biography about an obscure subject.  There isn't very much that is known about Mamah, so all that the author can really do is to give us the timeline of her life plus FillerFacts.  For example, she got a master's degree in the 1890s and then moved to Michigan with a friend to teach for a few years.  Instead of "oooh why did she get a master's degree in the 1890's, not a lot of chicks doing that at the time, why Michigan, etc?" we get Facts about the college and the town where she lived.  Not wildly exciting stuff.
• The thing I have beef with: in the intro the author says something like "oh it's really unfortunate that if anyone has heard of Mamah at all it's from Loving Frank".  Hi, would it be asking too much to tell us why you think this is unfortunate?  Is there something about the book that you don't like or are you just saying that it's a shame that we don't have a lot of info on someone who died over 100 years ago?
• All of this goes to say that I didn't actually read A Brave and Lovely Woman per se.  It was too dense, so I looked at the pictures and skimmed it for details.  For example, FLW and Mamah met in 1902 and left their spouses for each other in 1909, but no one knows when they started bumping uglies...obviously this book can't tell us that either but it's got the timeline so that I can speculate, so in that sense it was a worthwhile read, er I mean a worthwhile skim.
• I don't have another fiction book on tap for right now, but I do have another audio book going.  There are some books that as soon as I hear the title I know that I'm all in.  Currently listening to I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jeannette McCurdy.  I didn't know who she was, and her IMDB page says that she "confirmed...that she was done with acting and will now focus on writing and directing".  Based on the writing that I've heard so far WOW GOOD CHOICE!!!!  I mean, I assume that she was a good actor as well but I'm glad that she's writing and I want more.
• Last thing to say: I added the recommendation sources for all of the books that I've read so far this year to my books page. 
  

Bye for now!  What do you call it when you just skim a book?  I can't really say that I read it but it's not really a DNF either.