Life is more than the Cubicle

So the non-cooking thing was getting to a point of being just sheer ridiculous and I was veering dangerously into the territory of lower than depressing college student with frozen dinners, bread and butter and lunches of frozen vegetables and soups made of random items.

It actually got so bad, that for Halloween, when our program sponsored a taco lunch for the whole team, I took home an entire steamer tray of rice, beans, assorted meats and salsa. I still have a small soup container left but I ate that stuff for lunch and dinner every single day last week.

Gross, I know. You now know WAY more about me than you ever wished...and there is no way that you can un-know what you now know! HA!


Anyway


I went to the grocery store (gasp)

I love Sprouts

The BF and I went to Napa over the weekend to celebrate his new job and to relax and get out of town. We drove up on friday night after work and had dinner in downtown Napa at a tapas place named Zuzu. The next day, we spent the morning at Oxbow public market checking out the farmers market, had some mexican breakfast fare and coffee and then headed out wine tasting along the Silverado Trail. We hit up Mumm, Miner Family, Robert Sinskey, Chimney Rock and maybe another? After we got back into town, we had some oysters inside of Oxbow at Hog Island Oyster, bought some cheese and charcuterie from The Fatted Calf. Saturday night, we had dinner at Bounty Hunter in downtown Napa and then Sunday, we had a picnic with the cheese and charcuterie goodies that we picked up at Oxbow along with a bottle of merlot. It was so much fun that I forgot to take pictures :)







Slow Cooker Dish 2: These are turkey, apple and cheddar meatballs from the same book that I made tonight. These were pretty good. I grated the green apple and smoked cheddar with my food processor to cut out on the arm work. The apple and cheddar are mixed with ground turkey, an egg, dried cranberries and some spices and formed into meatballs. Stack the meatballs into the cooker and cook on high for 4-6 hours.

I cooked mine for about 4 hours and it turned out a bit drier than I would have liked, so this probably would have done well with just 3 hours of cooking. I served this along with a pasta with an olive oil, pea, shallot, garlic and lemon sauce and we had two english muffins from a Napa bakery that were SO good. I also made homemade blackberry jam with some fruit that I couldn't finish from the weekend. The jam was made by boiling the blackberries (mashed a bit with a potato masher) and maple syrup for a sweet and slightly smoky flavor. We paired all of this with a chardonnay from Carmel Valley Vineyards.

It's really sad that Borders is closing and going out of business, but it also means that I have epic book hauls like the one I got two days ago.

Honestly, I was in the store for maybe an hour and had to pare my haul down from 6 books to 4 only because my arm capacity was exceeded. The haul included:

For dinner tonight, since I was starving by the time I got home, I grilled (inside) up a big hunk of steak that I bought from Sprouts

This is what school does to my eating habits...

Dinner at 9:30pm
Cooking once, MAYBE twice a week
Eating leftovers forever..
Lots of weird cravings around finals time.

I know I promised a picture from my finals and my singles weekend and here it is in all of its glory!

So this happened to me last night...See if you can figure out what it is exactly and what happened...





It's a letter opener

That was stuck to the bottom of my pot

That somehow ended up on my burner

That ERUPTED into flames......

I didn't realize it until I wondered why it suddenly seemed like Pompeii in my kitchen and it was dangerously apparent that my neighbors would hate me when the entire building's smoke alarms AND sprinklers all went off....yeeaaaahhhhhhhhhh....




However... I still win!




Randoms:

• On my way home from work yesterday, I saw two kids. One was on crutches and the other way rolling along on a scooter. My first impression was, "Hey that kid on the scooter is an asshole! He should walk and carry his friends crutches and let the poor kid's armpits take a break" and then I realized, you need two weight bearing legs to use a scooter. But you know, you can always make it work..

• After a few days of reading these reports at work, my eyes started to play this fun game of "Let's jump randomly around the paragraph picking out random phrases!" So of course, the writing made no sense and then I wanted to write a negative comment. But would writing a negative comment because my mind refused to pay attention really make me a jerk? Probably..

• My cube mate is gone so my kingdom now expanded to 12' by 6'. Go me! I'm the queen of my (sad) grey little domain