A Glutton for (Delicious) Punishment

A few months ago, there was a night when Eric was going out with the boys and I decided to spend my evening alone by ordering take out and watching a girlie movie. My take out choice ended up being a small pizza from a local Italian-Greek restaurant...and onion rings...and a piece of cheesecake. Go big or go home, right? (And by big, I apparently mean fat in this instance!)

I ended up saving one piece of the pizza (couldn't finish the whole thing, of course - I mean, that would be shameful!) and saved the cheesecake for another evening. But the point of this (other than to tell you that sometimes when a girl has a craving, all common sense goes out the window) is to say that I was amazed at how much time I had that evening!

I was done eating my dinner by 6:30 pm. On an average night, we're finishing dinner around 8 pm! And then there are the dishes to deal with!

But while that may be exhausting, on most nights I'm happy to have chosen to spend my time in that way. We're eating healthier meals made of fresh whole foods, and not only does it taste great - but the pride in having created something tasty from scratch is priceless.

Case in point: I lost my mind on Friday night. After working 8 hours (and commuting 50 minutes each direction on the metro), then coming home and walking the dog for 45 minutes or so, I:

• whipped some of my bread dough out of the freezer and baked it and then turned it into garlic bread
• made pasta from scratch for the first time (outside of the class I took at Sur La Table)
• made my favorite cookies, you know the ones I'm talking about by now - the oatmeal chocolate chip walnut ones? Yeah, those. Drooool!

Needless to say, we didn't sit down to eat until 9 pm. Unthinkable to many, I know (like both my and Eric's parents!) but hey - go big or go home, right? It was a delicious meal, and while I might have been ready to pass out after the last dish was washed, I sure was proud of what I had made from raw ingredients.

The sauce we put on the pasta was homemade from our garden tomatoes back in September!

And then tonight, I decided that I was going to make rolls for our buffalo burgers from scratch. As soon as I got home I made the dough, much to Tater's chagrin. ("We'll go for a walk in just a minute, Tater, I swear." Queue dog to freak out because I said the "w" word.)

Between making those and sweet potato fries (which turned out pretty terribly - I still can't figure out the best way to bake those to get a good result) I was a bit stressed out in the kitchen again - maybe several of the rolls slid off the baking sheet into the oven at one point when I was moving them from one rack to another...maybe I uttered a few choices curses...but hey, I never claimed to be Martha Stewart. The end result (for the rolls anyway) was yummmmy. A little dense for a burger roll, Eric said, but would be perfect with a stew. I'm pretty excited to turn the leftovers into sandwich rolls for my lunch this week, or croutons to go with the wild salad greens we have in the fridge.

See the indents in a few of the rolls? That's from my snatching them out from the various crevices of the oven that they slid off of the parchment paper into.

We had some landscaping done yesterday but that's a whole 'nother post - so I'll get to that later this week. Stay tuned!