MonkeyBites

Super secret knitting project! Well, not as super secret as it could be if I weren’t posting pictures of it but hey- it’ll do. Nothing but progress shots for a while though. I’m trying to finish by Sunday since classes start the next day (which will likely hamper any additional progress). Nothing like a deadline to get things rolling!

I’ve made peace with the fact that probably 2/5ths of my daily photos will be of food. This is because I like to cook. A LOT. I like having control over what goes into it and playing with ingredients. This photo however, is more about my attempts at a pantry stashdown.

I blame the food blogs I follow for getting me all into making soups lately. I used some of my homemade chicken stock to make a modified pasta e fagioli. I didn’t have the right noodles and wasn’t about to buy new ones when I had something SO CLOSE! So I cooked them till they were just pliable enough to cut, chopped them up and added them to the soup. I also used lentils instead of cannelini beans (cause that’s what I had), added the rest of the roast chicken from last week (I’d frozen it), added the liquid from the can of whole tomatoes, and 2 of my chicken stock cubes (I wanted more liquid). So good!

This house sits just across the road from the cemetery where my grandparents rest. I love the old dilapidated houses and tobacco barns that line the state’s highways, and have this idea to photograph them all before they crumble into piles of wood and kudzu.

There’s quite a lot of correction going on here (which you’ll see in the blurry patchiness) because Anna’s got a bit of a rash on her adorable face that looks worse than it is. I just couldn’t resist sharing a photo of her, as she’s the spitting image of her father. So cute!

This claddagh ornament was the last to be removed from my Christmas tree when I finally took it down late Thursday night/Friday morning. That tree could’ve easily stood another month in my place, as it had lost hardly any needles and showed no signs of deterioration.

Alas, Saturday was the last day that the city of Alexandria would pickup trees for recycling so it’s off to live a new life as mulch. It’s the ciiiiiiiiiiiiircle of liiiiiiiiiiife….

One jar of chicken stock (2 cups) and a bowl of leftover bones & veggies that were strained out. There’s more broth currently chilling in the freezer (poured into silicon muffin pan wells to freeze into servings), maybe another 2 cups worth.

Cooking makes me feel like a mad scientist.

Making chicken stock in the slow cooker this evening, since I didn’t get a snow day to stay home and let it cook all day long. This is a roast chicken carcass, some celery, red onion, carrot, and pink peppercorns. (I used this recipe as a guide.)

I guess I’ll use the finished product for… chicken soup? I took all of the meat off the chicken and most of it is sitting in the fridge. Throw in some veggies, noodles, and seasonings and I’ll be good to go right? Fingers crossed.

Hoping the rumors of snow would result in messy enough roads for me to stay home on Wednesday, I went to the store to pick up a few provisions. They were well stocked in milk and bread, but apparently there was a run on breakfast sausage (which tells me I wasn’t the only one planning for a delayed opening at the very least). I left with veggies and fruits for some new smoothie recipes, a roast chicken for making chicken soup, and a bag of Utz Sour Cream & Onion.

What? You try getting through a snowstorm without a bag of Utz Sour Cream & Onion. JUST TRY.

Ok, so I sort of forgot Monday. As often happens after staying up late the night before, I got home and took an unintended nap- missing my class at the gym. Then I had another project to work on, and suddenly it was 11:58p.

So what we have here is my ridiculously cluttered coffee table. The featured item (the orange coffee cup) being one of my favorite Christmas gifts. It’s from a set of 4, and the same as a set my grandparents had in their home in NC. While it’d have been nice to have the originals, I wasn’t thinking of that when my mom told me to pick out what I wanted from their house after my grandfather passed. Instead I took a framed picture of him as a young man, 2 of his belts, some shirts, and a pair of unworn pajamas. Had I been thinking, I’d have boxed up the whole house.