I have a pot of hamburger barley soup and three loaves of homemade bread. Yay, provisioned!

( recipes, in case you'd like to make these things too )

I looked in the fridge tonight, weighed my options, considered if I could order pizza, and ended up chopping up two beets and half a sweet potato, steaming them, frying an onion and a couple cloves garlic, adding the beets & potato, stirring in a beaten egg, then topping the whole thing off with half a cup of salsa.

Yeah, I don't know what I was trying to make either.

It is a little delicious, but mostly weird.

ETA: Just remembered I have Haagen-Dazs! Yay, my meal isn't going to consist mostly of wine! (It turns out I don't want to eat the beet-sweet potato-onion-garlic-salsa mess. Surprise.)

Cheap Healthy Good had a fabulous post last week about stretching one roast chicken into a hella lot of meals: 1 Chicken, 17 Healthy Meals, 26 Bucks, No Mayo

I'm not planning to do all their recipes, but tonight I made the first one, Marcella Hazan's Roast Chicken With Lemons, and Oh MY GOD, you guys. SO MUCH NOM.

In fact, I did not know there was this much nom in the world.

I have 3-hour night classes three times a week.

To get through these classes, I have to drink coffee.

Drinking coffee makes me stay up until 2... but I still have to get up at 7 the next day.

AARGH.

Anyone have any non-coffee stay-awake solutions?

I spent my first two years living alone with a pitiful kitchen kit: one knife, one wooden spoon, one charred pot, a cutting board, and a single place setting. Therefore, I sometimes forget that I have a Paderno designed for making delicate sauces... until I'm in the middle of trying to stir roux in my cast-iron, which is probably laced with lead. And then I remember that I don't have to be straining my wrist tipping the thing sideways to get enough depth to use my wisk, nor do I have to be poisoning myself with lead.

Dinner tonight was delicious, although possible replete with heavy metals and carcinogens. It had cremini mushrooms and asiago cheese, though, so I'm counting it as a plus.

(I'm now going to go gorge on the last two discs of Veronica Mars, season two.)

I have Been Away, flist, and am now back, and oh, I missed you all.

I have to sort out my current internet access problem. Dial-up is stupid. Buying dial-up in tokens of 20 hours in embarrassingly dumb. And working at a job where the boss has made you sign an agreement that you will be fired if you check your email at work is also dumb.

Anyway, the confluence of dumbness has kept me offline for two weeks. It is now Saturday evening and I finally gave in and bought more tokens and am now sitting with a bottle of wine reading back the hundreds of posts on my flist that I missed.

And am going to go make brownies in a minute. Mmm. Brownies. In short, this is a fairly perfect day. Also? There's a knitting store a five minute walk from my house which I did not know about. Five minutes.

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Things I have done these past two weeks instead of read fanfic, since I was cut-off from fandom goodness:

1. Ziplisted a lot of David Thewlis and David Hewlett movies. (I was also looking for Two Girls and a Guy, out of curiousity, but it seems that zip.ca does na' have it. I have a feeling that I am probably better off. And I'm still waffling about whether to watch Slither.)

Mike Leigh's Naked was difficult. I gave up, actually, 3/4 of the way through. Criterion pick and critical praise notwithstanding, I made a decision a while ago that I was going to stop watching films where women got sexually assaulted or killed in order to further the storyline of a male protagonist. Thewlis was very convincing, and certainly earned the Cannes accolades that the film received, but I still don't want to see it again.

(I did, however, find the werewolf comments early in the film pretty hilarious.)

By contrast, Treed Murray, which I watched yesterday, was fantastic. It's unsettling but eventually redemptive and the storytelling is awesome and I absolutely adore ensemble pieces where no-one is good or bad or eclipsed. And the pacing was great and the cuts were great and Hewlett was great and that Ashmore kid was surprisingly awesome. Also, it ended at precisely the right time. Y'all should go rent it. It's a very satisfying film.

2. Re-read Anthony Robbins' "Awaken The Giant Within". It's been remaindered at my store, which I find sad, but it meant that I could buy a copy for $3.19. I find Tony inspiring. Also, the last time I tried to read a "design your best life!" book, I found myself covering my eyes and reading between my fingers, totally involuntarily, so the fact that I managed this one--in a normal, sane, fashion--is promising.

3. Obtained seemingly hundreds of root vegetables, which I have no idea what to do with.

4. Neglected to honour my mother's self-imposed state of denial about the fact that my sister and her boyfriend are living together and yes, sleeping in the same bed. I feel kind of bad about this one. Jess and I have agreed to let her be happy and deluded, but then I had to go and say "no no, I don't need that extra bedframe you've got, but Jess and Matt would probably like to get the mattress they're sleeping on off of the floor."

5. Have bizarre "terrorists are buying books at our store!" problems. $2500 email orders for bio-chemistry textbooks and rocket engineering tomes to be delivered to tenements in Montreal, to be paid for by obviously stolen credit cards. Totally uninterested RCMP officers. When a plague descends on Quebec, I won't be surprised. I tried to stop the apocalypse, flist, I really did.
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Okay. Brownies now.