Girl time

Yesterday I cleaned all of the dirty dishes and vacuumed. This may not seem like much but when I was popping the vicodins every three to four hours, the thought alone was tiring. I was getting tired of looking at it all. And when your home most of the day, there's plenty of time to look at all of this stuff. There were some other reasons as well but I'll get to that later.

Part of the inspiration for the kitchen cleaning was Cookiecrumb. I cannot function in a dirty kitchen. Instead, I have been eating my way through the freezer contents. First there was the quiche. This was followed by some leftover chili and then jambalaya. I still have a quiche in there and one container of chile. Of course this means there's room in there for new things.


Specifically potato leek soup. Left: before blending. Right: after blending and addition of cheese.

And potato leek soup means that I'll be out shopping today. Because you know what goes really well in that soup? Yep. Crumbled bacon. And there isn't any around here because some pig managed to eat a whole pound in a single day.

And I am so loving Ted Allen these days because of his comments on last week's elimination challenge on "Top Chef." When describing Tre's dish, he said something along the lines of, "Two words. Ba. Con." The minute I saw bacon-wrapped shrimp on a bed of cheese grits, I knew I was in deep love. In fact I haven't stopped dreaming about the stuff. But I digress.

How does Cookiecrumb fit into this all, you ask? Well, she keeps showing off the lovely bounty of her garden lately. And then I realized that I haven't really been eating salads over the summer. Perhaps because I think of salads as something that can be thrown together faster than cooking an average meal for me. And here I was all of this free time suddenly so why not cook all those things for which I normally do not have time? But I have started to miss my salads. Now I've noticed that Cookiecrumb usually uses a plate, whereas I am kind of partial to bowls -- especially if the salad is my entire meal. Last night I decided on steak with a side salad as well as one of my other weaknesses in life, a baked potato. (My top foods are (1) bacon, (2) fish and shellfish, (3) dairy products -- love them all -- and (4) potatoes.) There were so many choices to be made.


I ended up with this.

And so today I will be giving the apartment another go over. After going out to buy bacon. Because I will have a guest off and on over the next month -- Grasshopper! She has to be out of her current place by 6 a.m. on Thursday so for at least the next few nights, she'll be crashing at my place. She and her boyfriend have had a chance to talk to the landlord. The landlord now recognizes that they are not sleazy like the other inhabitants of their apartment and she has given them an application. Another unit is supposed to become available in the building in about a month. Until then, Grasshopper is couch surfing.

Grasshopper pointed out that this will be an opportunity to catch up on girl time that we have been missing. There will be wine drinking, watching "Hex," and more listening to 80s tunes. There may be the occasional trip to Naia. I pointed out that I have a gift certificate for Cesar; she has one for Macaroni Grill. Yep, some crazy girl days ahead.

Finally, a confession. Part of how I motivate myself is blog writing. I wrote this post before preparing any food. Once it was written, I felt obligated to follow through. I do this quite often.