^^ Harvey is playing the harmonica here. It was very soulful.
My baby turned two last month and my husband turned thirty two. When did we start getting to be such old people? They were both royally spoiled--I even made Evan this ice-cream-cake-roll and, dude, filled with mint cookie ice cream, it's pretty super duper.
We've spent a lot of time in our rain boots looking for puddles and my favorite part is that Harvey likes to walk with one of our trekking poles (collapsed so it's really small), and he looks like an old man. There is a kitty in our neighborhood who is really friendly and she usually comes with us to look for puddles.
My show goes up in two weeks and I'm really excited. Tonight we are adding hanging hardware to the backs of all the paintings (it might take 80 hours, but I hope not). I've appointed Evan to be my manager, and he made an excel chart to figure out all the prices (we charge by the square inch, how funny is that?), and I've got all the tags ready to go. Gosh, it's been so fun.
I tried a new thing last month! Instead of making a meal plan a week at a time, like I've been doing for 7.5 years, I tried doing a monthly meal plan. It changed my life and I can't stop mentioning it to people! I mean, I've never looked forward to planning our meals before, and it seemed like every week, I'd be left scratching my head, wondering what the heck we should eat. BUT! With this new system, you only have to do it once a month! And because you have so many slots to fill, you start to get creative, and you try a bunch of new winner recipes. And then, this is my favorite part, next January, I already have my meals planned! I KNOW! I'm going to do this all year long, trying to add lots of variety and seasonally appropriate menu items, and then for rest of my life I'll never have to plan a menu. See? I know.
On Saturday after a long (good long) day in the mountains, where, wait for it.......we saw THE SUNSHINE (!!!!!), we were very hungry. I was throwing together some chili, and I totally ditched the recipe and improvised and we ended up with the best pot of soup of our lives. And I took some notes after I'd recovered from my soup-coma, and I'd like to share it here now:
Holly Rocks the Chili (it's a working title)
olive oil
garlic salt
onion
zucchini
carrot
bell pepper
sweet potato
frozen corn
15 oz. black beans
15 oz. pinto beans
15 oz. diced tomatoes
1/2 box chicken/vegetable stock
salt, chili powder, cayenne, cumin, red pepper flakes
cilantro* (do not skip! this is the secret ingredient!)
As you can see, this is a very precise recipe, with very exact measurements. I added some olive oil to my pot, and all the veggies, diced to uniform size. I added the spices--we like it spicy, so I went heavy on all the hot stuff--and then dumped everything else in (oh! be sure to drain and rinse the beans). I let if simmer for almost an hour and served with cheese, sour cream, crushed corn chips and freshly cooked tortillas. Bonus points if you have avocado.
*I found these frozen cilantro cubes at the grocery store and I add them to basically everything I cook and it makes everything taste at least 50 times better. They are 1 tsp each of finely chopped cilantro in olive oil--for this recipe I added 4 cubes
