Stress Cooking

Another week down. Is summer over yet??
For some reason I am already thinking of Halloween, and Thanksgiving, and Christmas. And cooler weather.

It was a pretty normal week, I don't think anything amazing happened.
We were supposed to get some tropical storm but it totally missed us. It didn't even rain as much as usual that day.

All I wanted was to get to the weekend. I even did all of my chores earlier than usual so they'd be out of the way. And I got all the ingredients for sweet potato gnocchi in brown butter oregano sauce! I was originally going to make this after work on Tuesday, but forgot that I had book club with my sisters, so Jameson volunteered to make it.

Turns out this may have been a mistake...if you're not in the mood to cook, it often doesn't turn out the way you like (I speak from LOADS of experience haha). Not all of the gnocchi made the cut to the plate, but the ones that did were delicious. Jameson refused to eat any, being very annoyed and completely over cooking by the time the meal was finished. But I wish he had tried some. It was extremely good.


While he was cooking a big storm rolled through, tearing one of the screens off the lanai. This did not improve his mood.
Ah. What can you do. I don't know what to do.
We're all human beings, we all have days like this. But I hate to see him angry, or depressed, or unhappy with himself. But I do not know how to fix it.

I ate the gnocchi and he called a repairman. We cleaned up and spent the rest of the night trying not to engage with, like, the world.

The next day was very slow. The highlight of the day was having Jameson's friend Lea over to record his song for an upcoming project. While they recorded I hung around the house trying to be quiet. I did some weeding and some steno practice. I was also waiting around for the screen repair guy to show up, which he never did. Maybe tomorrow.

When the recording was finished Jameson made air-fried Oreos and mini air-fried candy bars for us! So good! I think he's perfected that recipe. It was really nice to have someone over. We were as responsible as we could be with distance and masks and all that. Just glad to see other humans :)

Later on we ordered some Bento and I researched things to cook while Jameson played video games.
Pretty slow evening.

On Thursday after a quick breakfast I went to the grocery for some ingredients to make key lime pie popsicles!
The recipe I used is HERE. I chose Fage 5% fat Greek yogurt, and added honey, lime juice, and lime zest. Other recipes called for condensed sweetened milk...I'm sure that would taste more accurate but as someone who struggles with lactose and wants to eat healthy I couldn't justify that. This recipe has you crumble some raw graham crackers and mix them with butter. I chose to toast my crumbles with salted butter, brown sugar, and a little cinnamon. My hope is that this will make the crumbles more crunchy so that they'll hold up if I mix them in with the liquids. They're not ready to eat yet but I'm sure they'll be delicious!


Once that was done I settled in for a zoom chat with my Ruby Princess ladies!
We did a zoom chat about a month ago and it was awesome. So much fun to chat about all the things going on with our lives, share stories and experiences and make each other laugh. This meeting was no exception, we had a solid 2.5 hour hang. Everyone is mostly doing well, although more of us are going to therapy (not surprising the way things have been!). Mostly it was just good to see their smiling faces.

I left the chat earlier than most because I needed to start prepping for dinner.
Ever since my last attempt at pizza and wings, I've been avoiding the pizza stone.
That time, my pizza turned out stiff as a board...still edible, but rock-hard.
And my oven-baked wings were soggy and oily, not very appetizing at all.
Since then I haven't felt confident enough to try again, or rather I didn't really know what to do to improve things. But after some research on at-home pizza techniques, I settled on a method involving alternating between the bake and broil settings to achieve a crisp outer crust and a chewy texture.

And it worked! The pizza turned out PERFECT. I could not have asked for a better result.



The wings were much easier as well thanks to our new air fryer. I simply tossed them in a bit of oil, salt, and pepper, then cooked them in the air fryer for 20 minutes. I reduced an Asian-inspired glaze on the stove and tossed the wings in that before returning them to the air fryer for five minutes. They turned out great, crispy and sticky goodness.



Since Jameson had such a lousy cooking experience a few nights ago, I feel a little guilty about having a successful cook. But also, I think we all have our share of bad cooking days. I have thrown out entire batches of expensive meat that I've ruined, or slaved over food for hours only to have it turn out "meh". Sometimes I don't concentrate and burn things, or worse, undercook things. It's disappointing and upsetting, no question. But it's just going to happen. I can't stop cooking just because things didn't work out one time (I've spent years avoiding cooking already) and I don't think Jameson will stop cooking because of one incident either. If we want to enjoy good food at home, there's nothing for it but to plow forward despite ourselves.

So that was that.
I didn't get any gardening pictures this week because it was either too hot or raining. The butterflies wouldn't stay long enough for me to get footage, and I didn't want to be outside that long either in any case. The plants are all the same, nothing new there.

This week...I don't know. Perhaps we're feeling anxious and stressed. Maybe we're in an end of summer funk. It's just hard to take joy in anything right now. So we're stress cooking and eating whatever comes out of it.

I hope this year at least ends well.