The times, they are a-changin' (in our fridge)

So one of my life long best friends got us a great wedding gift.  We got a cookbook/natural lifestyle guide titled "Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats," by Sally Fallon.  It. is. awesome.  The book gives you the basic information you need to be able to feed your modern family using pre-industrialized food preparation techniques.  Told you it's awesome.  I'd really like to make the switch to home made and natural foods before we're ready to start trying for kids.  

My nerdy background has made me privy to lots of information on epigenetics and the impact that your diet can play on the child you carry in your womb.  But for the sake of my wallet and my husband's picky palet, I'm starting off slow.  I began by asking for glass food storage containers on our wedding registry.  BPA can do some nasty things.  The convenience of plastic is not worth risking health in my book.  

First recipe?  Well we are out of ketchup, so I will begin by fermenting my own ketchup.  The game plan is to replace our previously store-bought items with home-made as we run out of them.  I think after ketchup I'll tackle mayonaise, which seems like a nice simple recipe.  The cool thing about these recipes is that they use lacto-fermentation as preservation.  If I do it correctly, most of these condiments will last for months in the fridge just like their store-bought counterparts with artificial preservatives.

I'm hoping that this time next year, my fridge will have at least 75% home made contents.  I don't expect that we will ever completely break away from convenience foods.  Let's face it, I love Wendy's, my husband loves Popeye's, and we both love Steak'n'Shake milk shakes and treating ourselves to a dinner date night out.  My hope is that the majority of our regular at home diet will have fewer labels with encyclopedias of ingredients on the back.  

In other news, we're nearly finished with Mockingjay in our Hunger Games audiobook adventure!  It has been so great to share books I love with my husband, and we've bothed really enjoyed some time together at home without a TV.  We really had fun revisiting the Hunger Games movie now that he actually knows what's going on.  He said it's like a whole new movie when you really understand the back story.  Now we're both fired up the the Catching Fire movie this fall!!!      

I also ordered our wedding photobooks and they should be getting here in the mail early this week.  It will be great to finally have our pictures in a physical form!  I think the next project will be getting some quality prints framed up, but I might wait until we move to our next place and have more wall space.  

We've got a lot more exciting stuff coming up, I can't wait to share once it all goes down!

One way to lose a quick 2 pounds...

    This week I finally got around to donating my hair!  I was very careful to grow it out nice and healthy for the wedding, and now the inconvenience has taken over.  The truth is that we live in Houston.  Hair to your elbows just plain sucks in 100 degree heat.  So here's what happened:

I weighed myself before and after the salon. 2lbs of hair gone to locks of love!

I still haven't gotten my driver's license back from changing my name, so that battle drags on.  The thesis drags on as well.  I can't wait to get that stupid thing over with.

    Basically things are dragging on, and I had a frustrating week.  Luckily I was able to lean on my friends and family when I had a few rough days.  I'm pretty worn out from a long weekend, so I don't have much juice for writing about the week.  Maybe I'll jot something this week before next sunday to make up for it.
   

Monday is the New Sunday

So this week I gained some serious knitting steam! I had nearly run out of my yarn and ordered some more from the nearest Hobby Lobby (who has yet to obtain some after 2 weeks).  Luckily, I was working in another part of town and stopped in the HL while I was wandering around.  They had a great big shelf full of my much needed yarn!

If you've never been mid afghan and low on supplies, you may not know this kind of despair.  I have a nasty habit of beginning large projects with too little yarn and small projects with too much yarn.  It could be some strange form of knitting dyslexia, but I may need a few more cases before I start naming disorders after myself.

Some more good news!  We got our wedding pictures back from the photographer, and the wedding video back from the editor!  Also after  a few months of asking my husband to read a book with me, we are reading/re-reading the Hunger Games together! Bam!
I love these books and really wanted to re-read them before the next movie.  Solution?  Get yourself a library card and download an e-audio book. My dad does this all the time to listen to books while he walks the dog.  It's a great service.  You can load the books onto your ipod or whatevs.  Right now I love having it on my laptop.  We turn off the TV and listen to the story.  It's like listening to the pre-TV radio stories, and is a super easy way to enjoy a "book" with your non-reading engineer types like my dad and husband.

So that's pretty much it.  I had a pretty good week. Nothing spectacular, but a solid handful of little pleasures is a great reward.  And I got a free milkshake today.  That is all.

Better late than never!

     So last night I was supposed to write my 3rd blog entry.  Didn't quite make that deadline.  I made another important one instead... submitted my master's thesis draft for a preliminary review by the graduate school!!  Woo hoo! May not seem very exciting, but it is a very important step toward getting this master's degree thing wrapped up with a nice little bow on it so I can move on with my life (by applying for another master's because I'm drunk on learnings).

Scholastic ambition is dumb.  Avoid it if you can.

    Last week was a pretty good week.  Husband man and I had a great 4th of July with friends and family.  Like most people in Texas, we enjoyed a far too carnivorous day of eating and drinking with some pyrotechnics sprinkled in there.  It's hard to spend a thursday much better than with family, food, and fireworks!

Real G's chill with fam

    I did manage to create something this week in between the mad thesis scramble of '13....  apple-banana bread!!  Am I a genius?  Certainly not in the kitchen.  Any other form of genius has yet to manifest, but we will see.
Back to the lecture at hand (perfection is perfected, so I'm 'a let 'em understand, from a young G's perspective)....  apple. banana. bread.

    I used this recipe for classic banana bread.  Then I got snazzy.  Add 1/2 cup of peeled then diced apple.  You definitely want to add 1/2 of chopped walnuts if you've got them, but no sweat if you don't or if you are a hater of delicious, savory tree nuts.  (More apple = more juice, use a little less milk if you're gonna go apple heavy)

    Are you impressed?  Well you might want to try the recipe with the added apples and re-evaluate your answer.  The apples lend a little juice to the situation and make for a very happy, moist banana bread.  I recommend serving it hot out of the oven so that your butter can melt on nicely while you pop planet of the apes into your DVD player/Netflix cue.  Please don't ruin your wonderful new bread with hydrogenated soy bean oil spreads and bull shit.  Cows make milk, milk makes butter.  Less chemistry is better.  (Learn you some moderation like a grown-ass adult and stop eating industrial by-products. end rant.)
     Probably one of the most memorable dates I had with my husband was the first time I baked nanner bread for him and we had a Planet of the Apes marathon in my apartment.  Oh yeah, it's corny. Oh yeah, it's delicious.

    May-haps I shall concoct a rum cake and view many Pirates of the Caribbean, if the winds a-favor it.
    Better yet, we'll have a Matrix marathon and I'll bake cookies then take them all away because they were only part of the Matrix and we're above such falsehoods.

    I didn't take a picture of our spoils this time... I'll get better at this.