So...whats for dinner?

I forgot to say to Tazzy that I'm glad she's recovering from her injury.  Tazzy, sounds like your dh is a big help when the primary cook is off duty. 

Tonight was Family Meal. I started the 7-bone braise last night. Husband followed my directions today and threw it back into the oven at 4:30. When I got home from my client office, I prepped some veggies to roast. It was a really tasty dinner on a cold, wet night. I held some back in the kitchen so we will have enough leftovers for at least one more dinner, and maybe a lunch.

No dresses arrived today. Thank goodness I have three older dresses that would work in a pinch.

*susan*

Susan, do you have a link for 7-bone braise?  Years ago we used to have 7-bone beef chops available at the meat market. 

Moon, you always seem to eat well with the minimum of effort! 

I have three leftover brats from dh's dinner last night.  Trying to think of a way to incorporate them into a meal for tonight.  They were cooked in beer on the stovetop and allowed to brown when the beer had evaporated.  I'm considering slicing them into coins and adding them to a tomato sauce to serve over pasta.  Pretty weird, huh?  Dh liked the idea but he perks up at any mention of pasta!  LOL!

I renigged on my intention to skip eating last night.  We had leftover deep-fried shrimp and oysters from a restaurant meal on Tues. night.  I heated them in the toaster oven and ate them with some leftover romaine and blue cheese dressing, also from the restaurant meal.  DH chose mac and cheese for his side on Tues. night and the serving was big enough for 3 reasonable portions.  It was undoubtedly off the scale for calories and fat but also much better than any mac and cheese I've ever made.  Creamy and cheesy.  Dh finished it up last night with his brat and baked beans out of a can.  He was happy! 

Grocery shopping for my mother today.  She's 91 and recited quite a list over the phone this morning.  She still does some cooking for herself even though she's in an electric wheelchair and has difficulty standing.  It's quite a feat to stir a pot on the stove sitting in a wheelchair.

Decided on Hamburger Helper! Too bad if hubby don't like it!

susan - glad you have a workable dress option, now it sounds like you will do an accessories search - good luck!  I hope you are not overdoing it with everything that is left - especially if you are not feeling the best.  I should fly up and help you!  To cheer you up I will post a pic from the DD at work.  She takes at least one kangaroo picture a day - we are now calling it "The Daily Roo" and they are hilarious!

The Roo is great!

*susan*

Special, love the roo, too!

Minus, nice homecoming meal, for sure!

Carole, I guess I need to find out who Anne Burrell is.....a bit in foodie left field here.

Redheaded, lamburgers are an easy, tasty way to begin eating lamb. I mix fresh garlic and rosemary powder and s. and p. in the lamb, then form the patty, grill it, then put it on h- burg bun with romaine, sliced  tomato, red onion and sliced feta. I use ketchup on mine, too.  Lamb does tend to be one of those foods that people are rarely neutral about. I know several friends who just can't stand it's specific gamey (?) taste. And others who adore lamb!

Eric, keep the jokes coming....love 4th grade humor!

I have returned to the land of the living and will try to organize some thoughts about our meals and travels in Italy and post them tomorrow. Glad I did one post already from Rome since I can hardly recall those meals. 

Will try to post from my computer (which fusses since I rarely use it) tomorrow, so I can include pix....if I even know how to do that on this site. Michelle used to be my sweet picture poster. .

I gave my son a choice of steaks or pork loin tonight.  It will be pork loin marinated in Apricot Chipotle sauce.  Fun to have someone to cook for, but he's not pleased w/the choc chip cookies in the cookie jar.  Oh he likes the cookies, but says they're too tempting.  He's noticing body fat redistribution at age 44.  Hmmm - we all know about that.

Sharon "hates" me when I make cookies...and at the same time says how good they taste.  :-)

DD just says how good they taste.

Rain here too, 6 inches yesterday! French onion soup today with fresh baguettes. Rh1, I'll send you a couple ;-) 

Gonna be getting that rain that is out in the Midwest. We do need it.

Leaving dinner up to hubby to decide for once. Brain is just too tired to think!

I like to watch Ina  (Barefoot Contessa)  One day she made these mustard roasted potatoes---cut the red potatoes into quarters and put them on a baking sheet with olive oil and salt and tossed them, then she squirted dollops of whole grain mustard in a few spots and got her hands in there and tossed them again and roasted them in the oven.   They are really good. Roasting is my favorite way to cook a lot of veggies.... I kind of enjoy that caramelized, almost burnt quality I sometimes get....

Yum! I like the sound of those mustard coated potatoes and the fish.

So I am just getting on my computer ( hardly ever use this) after walking up town with my next door neighbors and DH to have dinner and compare notes on our Italy trips. They did a week long cooking course in the  Umbria region, and said it was great but way too much eating. I agree that one or two days is optimal.

So, since I don't have my pix entered into the computer yet, I will do some narrative tonight and get some pix in later.

Oh, first of all, Redheaded, I had lots of flavors of gelato..mainly liked the pistachio, with peach a close second.

Last time I wrote about the trip, we had just finished our stay in Rome.The following AM, after a hearty Italian hot and cold buffet breakfast we had a very confusing time in the Rome Train station, before finally boarding our train.
There was no one to assist ignorant English speaking travelers (i.e., us!), so when some young girls offered to help us enter our info into the computer ticket machines, DH went along with one...however, an older man later came by indicating to me that we should not be letting them "help" us, and said to DH, "gypsies". He showed us how to get to our train, which was VERY far away (and at that point we were late), and pointed how far we must run, which we did with all of our luggage (thank you Sarah, our trainer!)...DH offered the man a euro for his help and he scoffed...but he took two euros, and off we went. Later learned from another woman on the train that they had the same experience, but their man "helper" demanded twenty euro, which they gave. Guess we were lucky...and we made our train.

We rented our car in Chiusi. It was supposed to be a stick shift small Ford, but ended up being an automatic Audi wagon...drove like a road hugging sports car. I loved that...and the fact that we had a diesel automatic going up the hair raising mountain roads to our villa. I found it really scary driving on roads we did not know with road signs we did not understand with most all other cars going 140 kms.  Could not find the road signs key on any maps we had! I kept thinking about our travel agent telling us of all her clients who got expensive tickets (after returning home)for obscure road offences. I was a set up for that! I'll be checking our mail carefully. We had planned to stop for lunch in a village on the way to Pariana...however, there seemed to be no such place that had existed in our minds. So, after an hour or so, we randomly got off the auto strada, and found a small hotel with a restaurant attached where we had lunch. I had a greens salad, (very light and fresh) and DH had a pasta dish...I actually hardly recall anything but the cute kids who came in with their parents, and chowed down on their pasta.

So, back on the highway towards Pescia and Collodi, the towns, next to our remote village. Collodi is named after Carlo Collodi, the author of The Adventures of Pinocchio. Who ever knew that Disney had not created that little fella! There is a whole village devoted to him; sort of a small time theme park...but not as accommodating to tourists, since the full service restaurants adhered to the Italian schedule of not serving dinner until 8PM, which was a problem for us the next day. 

So, late on Saturday afternoon we made it up our hair pin hill and Danny the landlord was waiting for us at the village, showed us where to park, and after showing us the many quirks of the house, took us back down the hill to Pescia to food shop. I could tell by the cut of the kitchen (tiny, with no prep surfaces and a propane fueled stove the tank of which  he required to be turned on and off whenever we used any burnersl), we would not be having many meals at home, so just bought yogurt, fruit, cheeses, veggie snacks, etc. Danny could not hide his horror at my selections. LOL. I think he expected me to be cooking up a storm in the villa....HA! So we were then dropped off, left to figure out how we would cope with no heat on a very very cool night, and no communication (no WIFi, minimal intermittent cell service, no house phone since the line was cut by the men who were digging up the village roads for the new heating system) with no English speaking folks in the village. So we decided this was going to be an adventure, had some cheese, crackers and wine and retreated to bed. Froze that first night.. glad our neighbor here advised us to bring lots of clothing layers.

Sunday we first took a walk beyond the village, wondering where this road at the top of the mountain would end.....at the village cemetery of course! It was really interesting to gather some history there and talk to a partially Eng speaking elderly woman who was refreshing flowers at the gravesite of her late husband and son.

We later ventured down the hill and explored Collodi, a charming village all about Pinocchio. as an aside, I found it odd that Pinocchio merch was featured heavily everywhere in Rome, Florence and Lucca. Patron saint of  fabricators? I did ask a young cabbie in Rome, why there was so much Pinocchio merch featured, and he responded, "maybe because they lie so much"!  

Late Sunday afternoon we tried to have dinner at any number of restaurants, and learned that none were serving until 7:30 or 8PM. I was not feeling comfortable, yet, taking on our hill after dark, so we opted to have a more casual meal at a bakery type spot, we had  bruschetta and a calzone type pie. Gelato there was not as tasty as the ones in Roma!

This is way long already, so I think I'll wait until tomorrow to report on the cooking class, which was delightful.   

SK -- more Roo!

Nancy, we will definitely get together while you're in LA and MS.  That menu is fabulous.  It must be $$$$$! 

I did a lot of cooking today.  I roasted a large pork roast for tomorrow's Sunday dinner at my mother's house and made gravy out of the drippings.  The roast is stuffed with chopped green onions and garlic.  I also made eggplant lasagna for dinner tonight.  And made turkey carcass soup for whenever.  Just as I was finishing up putting the lasagna together, dh called and reported that the Shrimp Man was out.  Did I want to buy some shrimp.  Naturally, I said "Buy 10 lbs." 

So we headed the shrimp, which were large (16 to 20 to a lb), and I bagged them in portions for freezing.  When they're frozen in water, they taste like fresh shrimp when they're thawed and cooked. 

Oh, and I prepped green beans to cook tomorrow. 

Lacey, I loved your travelogue and look forward to another installment.  Many years ago dh and I went to Europe for the first time for 5 weeks.  We landed in Portugal, travelled in that country and in Spain, through southern France, through Italy and across the water to Greece.  Mode of travel was 1st class Eurail.  We were "helped" twice in Italy.  A man approached us at the Milan train station and offered to guide us to a hotel.  We had no advance reservations and were relying on a guide book we'd purchased in the US.  We took the man up on his offer and followed him on a circuitous route to a hotel.  I think the hotel probably hired him to lure stupid Americans to the hotel!  As I recall, the room was ok.

Our next "helper" soured us on Italians!  Our Eurail passes included boat passage from Italy to Greece at a port called Brindisi.  I think that's the correct spelling.  On our arrival in Brindisi, a man offered to lead us to our ship.  He took us to a ship and we boarded it.  Eventually we learned that it was an Italian ship not a Greek ship, which we expected to board and sail to Athens.  This ship, which dh called a cattle boat, was jampacked with people and we were not given a little stateroom which we believed we were entitled to.  Plus this ship didn't sail to Athens but to some remote landing spot on the Greek coast.

I thought dh might have a nervous breakdown over the whole experience!  He's a merchant mariner and was highly critical of conditions on the ship.  When we went ashore in Greece, buses were waiting to take us on a trip to Athens that took a whole day, as I recall.  But the scenery was gorgeous.  Plus when we stopped at one point to stretch our legs and take care of body functions, I had the opportunity to use a primitive Greek toilet!  Eventually we got to Athens.  After a week there, we flew home and had another noteworthy experience:  one of the stewardesses on the plane was drunk and spilled trays on the passengers.  It was bizarre! 

I really should locate the journal I wrote while on this trip.  DH and I were truly Innocents Abroad.  It would be fun to do the trip again.