Weekly Round Up: Gotcha Day

 

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  In this week's edition we had a deep freeze, we kicked off Doggo's Gotcha Day celebrations, and STOP THE PRESSES I FOUND THE MOST AMAZING DINNER THAT YOU NEED TO DROP EVERYTHING AND MAKE RIGHT NOW.

What Day is Today?

Thanks for asking!  It's gotcha day!  One year ago today Hubs and I went to the shelter and came home with Doggo.

Yesterday the three of us went back to the shelter for a Gotcha visit.  We took a goodie basket of treats and toys, and Doggo got to show off to her former caretakers.  She is still skittish around new people, which includes "the people that took care of her in the shelter a year ago", but she soon warmed up and consented to do her roster of tricks in return for treats.  We'll be making return visits on future Gotcha Days.

How Cold Was it This Week?

I think you can tell by looking at Doggo in the picture above.  School was closed for two days.  Stepson #2 is a senior in high school, and the running joke is that each snow day could be his last.  All that Stepson #1 got was a late start at the university one morning due to the cold.

We had to cut Doggo's walks down to five minute outings plus some running around in the yard time.  Morning snuggles were extra toasty.

Eats

You know how it goes with meal planning.  We all see one bajillion new recipes on the internet every single day of our lives and every once in a while we get around to making one of these new finds.  Sometimes the end result is bad, sometimes it's OK, sometimes it's good enough, sometimes it's fabulous, and then one out of every thousand times you get dinner in my house yesterday.

As soon as I saw A Pinch of Yum's crockpot chicken bowls with yellow rice and cilantro pesto, my spidey senses told me that I should make it.  However there were a few land mines:

• I can't stand chicken.
• My family plays in a very limited range of taste profiles and they're slow to adopt new things.  When I see the phrase "cilantro pesto" my reaction is "huh I've never had that, I can't wait to try it" and their typical reaction is normally "what the what, let's have mac and cheese for dinner tonight".
• This is a dish with a lot of different tastes that taste great together.  Both my husband and stepson #2, who were the only family members home for dinner, prefer not to mix foods.

Nevertheless, that spidey sense of mine said to go for it.  For a dish that I wasn't sure if the fam would be into, I knew right away that I needed to double the recipe - one pound of chicken and one cup of dry rice is barely a meal in our house.  But did I need to double the pesto when there was a fair chance that I would be the only one eating it?  I flipped a coin and decided to go double or nothing.

Pros: very easy to make.

Cons: this is not a "one pot" meal.  However, we've adopted the "person who does the cooking does not do the dishes" standard so dish washing was not on my task list that night.

Let me talk through what's in the picture - salad mix topped with pickled red onion, shredded chicken simmered in enchilada sauce, yellow rice, guac, and the pesto in the center.

Here is my plate.  I went through the motions of tasting the chicken, and grabbed a can of refried beans out of the panty.

That pesto tho...the one complication is that the grocery store I went to only had shelled pistachios, and it was a bit of a lift to shell one cup.  However it was worth it.  As soon as I tasted it I would have been so happy if the fellas had wanted nothing to do with it.

And of course the guys were all about this meal.  The first item that we used up was the pesto, so my evening activities tonight included a run to the grocery store for more cilantro and (already shelled) pistachios.

Workouts

Same ol' treadmill stuff during the week, and it warmed up enough to hike this weekend.  I've been feeling a lot of cabin fever in these past few weeks, and the hiking challenge really helps.

This is a picture from last February:

 

This is the same place this weekend.  The weather is a bit different this year.

Watching

Not much to report except more Seinfeld, currently in season 5.  Sometimes you just can't spare a square.

Reading

Good nonfiction and fiction to report!

The non fiction book was Money for Couples by Ramit Sethi.  I picked this up because I'm a fan of his podcast, Money for Couples, which is what it sounds like...the show goes into every last detail of a couple's finances.  Actually I've followed Ramit off and on since the early blogging days.  The "on" part is that his blog was very useful to me in 2009 when I was trying to work my way back into the workforce after the recession kicked me out, and in general I like what he has to say.  The "off" part is that he can be heavy handed with selling stuff and ads.  I mean, I don't work for free either but when someone is too "selly" it's a turnoff.  I really liked the book and Hubs is reading it next.  I've mentioned before that we're both good with money, but we handle it differently and we're in a place that I think happens with a lot of blended family/second marriage situations.  We started out with totally separate finances, but over time things have merged and we're taking a look to see what makes sense as we transition into the empty nest years.  We *could* figure this out on our own, but I think we'll do better with the book's exercises to help us think through things.

And now fiction!  C/O the Sarah's Bookshelves Podcast, I'm reading Crow Mary by Kathleen Grissom.  It's a novel based on a true story about a young Native American who marries an older white trader and travels with him to Canada.  I'm about 30% in and liking it a lot.

Peace out!  We're looking forward to warmer weather this week! And more couch snuggles.