Weekly Round Up: There's no school like the old school

 

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  This weekend I kicked it old school and had a girls weekend with the dog while the boys were at Boy Scout camp.

Eats

Last week I really wanted avocado to go with the breakfast scramble that I've been crushing on.  I had a string of bad avocado luck and it took me until now to get a ripe one.  And sure enough once I got it I didn't want it anymore, at least not with the scramble. 

So now I found myself with an avocado on my hands and nothing to do with it.  Out of nowhere I got an old school craving for avocado toast, so that was my breakfast a few mornings this week. 

We had a group family dinner cooking effort the day before the boys went to camp.  The boys wanted sliders, so we made teeny tiny hamburgers.  My contribution was pan frying a skillet full of caramelized onions to top them with.  The ones with a single slice of cheddar were for the adults, and the ones with cheddar and provolone were for the folks who have teenage metabolisms.

For my first solo night I partied it up and got takeout.  I've said many times that I don't just read blogs, I take notes and one of those notes was that Suzanne was making Massaman curry.  The name sounded familiar and I couldn't remember what it tasted like, except that it was good.  I wanted someone else to cook it for me, so that was where our local Thai spot came into play.  I ordered it with tofu and "thai hot" for spice level and it was amazing.  (Full disclosure, although I like potatoes they were a bit much with the rice, and I loved the way the rice was soaking up the coconut milk, so I picked out the potatoes - my single girl takeout night, my rules).

But wait there's more!  I lazed around the house with takeout on Friday but I put myself to work on Saturday and restocked my freezer burrito supply.  The day started with me making a batch of breakfast potatoes, and then making a batch of my homemade "Trader Joe's" breakfast burritos with the potatoes and chicken sausage (rough recipe recap here) and also another batch of the CLV tofu breakfast burritos. And that was just breakfast!  

For dinner I made a burrito recipe that I'd seen on Sarah's Vegan Kitchen.  This is a link to a Youtube video and the recipe is in the description.  I didn't make the nacho sauce, but I did let loose with a generous heaping of homemade guac.

Workouts

Not much to say.  I've been feeling burnout when I do cardio so I took the weekend off from exercise.  I did get one last fall hike in on my long weekend staycation (picture up top).

Watching

I went on a movie watching binge this weekend, and hit a lot of the usual suspects (yep a rewatch of Casablanca was in there).

My post about Malabar Farm inspired a rewatch of Night After Night.  It came to mind for that post because it's based on a short story by Louis Bromfield but it's more famously known for being Mae West's first movie.  It's just a simple story about a speakeasy and it's 73 minutes long, so it doesn't strain your brain or waste your time and gosh I love this movie so much.

Mae doesn't show up until halfway through and her screen time can't be longer than 10 minutes but she OWNS every scene.  I already posted this clip in the Malabar post, but it's the best sample YouTube has to offer.  The night of drinking ends with an epic female friendship and an outcome that had me standing up and cheering.  I don't think there's any way to get a hold of the original short story, but I wonder so much if he wrote that part of the story or if Mae did (since she wrote all of her dialogue).

On the male side, the movie has fun teasing the audience with the male lead's growing star power.  Today when we hear the name George Raft, the subject is probably Humphrey Bogart with a footnote that Raft is the guy who turned down the leads in The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca.  But back then he was hot stuff and the movie basks in Giving the People What They Want.  To the extent that you get to see everything but his Raft in a bathtub scene.  Hey, it was his only shot at competing with Mae.

Reading

I finished Symphony of Secrets by Brendan Slocumb.  It's a "but" book, as in "I liked it but...", "it was good but..."

The "but" is that the conspiracy part of the story was way too heavy handed.  The estate of a famous, long dead composer finds his long lost opera score and hires a music expert to transcribe it.  When evidence comes to light that the famous, long dead composer didn't write the score it turns out that the estate is way ahead of everyone else and comes down like a ton of bricks to hide the secret.  They were just way too prepared and the response was way out of proportion.  And the way that the estate was stopped was just too convenient.  I wish the author had taken more time to work out this part of the story.  It was still good but it didn't hit like the author's first book, The Violin Conspiracy, did.

Currently reading: Happiness Falls by Angie Kim.  This author's first book was a DNF for me, simply because I couldn't get into it, but I heard enough good things about this one that I wanted to try it.  I'm just a few chapters in so it's too soon to tell if this book is going to "take" for me.

True confession: the checkout time for Falls is very short and I had two other books come in at the same time that I'm dying to read.  Why chose when I can...check 'em all out and put my Kindle in airplane mode to extend my checkout time.  A reader's gotta do what a reader's gotta do.

Anyone else use the airplane mode trick to extend their Libby holds;-)