Taking Charge

For the love of all that is holy, they really need to give Rob the SAME SHIFT ALL WEEK! I mean seriously, two days it’s 4am-1pm or around that, other days it’s been 11am-8pm, tonight was 3pm-11pm, tomorrow is 2pm-10pm. This seriously screws with my dinner planning up. For instance, I’m going to be making what I’d be having for dinner at lunch time so that Rob can get a decent meal before work.

Meal planning is a pain in the ass on days like this, but I do it. Tomorrow I will be making BBQ Chicken Breast on my Panini Grill, Busch’s Grillin’ Beans and *ponder* maybe quick taters. I haven’t decided yet.

I should go to bed, but I’m watching Big Brother: After Dark on Sho2 and after that I’ll watch more Olympic coverage til I fall asleep. I’d do so much better if I could fall asleep when I hit the bed, but I lay and toss and turn. I mentioned that I need to talk to the doctor about it, maybe she can give me something to help. I know it’s not covered by the Walmart plan, but I have a discount card that should make it fairly reasonable, I’d hope.

Anyway, I need to sleep, then get up and be a human in the morning to get work done, so I’m outta here.

Made by goodgal996

So, Rob came home from work with a handful of overripe peaches that needed to be used immediately. I cut 4 of them up and made the absolute *best* peach muffins evah. Yeah, they’re that good. I’ll be nice and post the recipe too

Blueberry Muffin
Recipe courtesy Paula Deen, 2008
Show: Paula’s Best Dishes
Episode: Ladies Who Lunch

Blueberry Muffin
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons teaspoons baking powder * Note the original calls for tablespoons, I used teaspoons
1/2 cup sugar
1 stick unsalted butter, melted
1 egg, slightly beaten
3/4 cup whole milk
1 1/2 cups fresh blueberries
1/2 cup granulated brown sugar or white sugar

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a 12-cup muffin tin.

In a bowl, combine the flour, baking powder and sugar. In another bowl, combine butter, egg, and milk and mix well. Pour the wet ingredients into the flour mixture and with a spatula, stir until just combined. Do not beat or over mix; it’s okay if there are lumps in the batter. Gently fold the blueberries into the batter.

Spoon the batter into the muffin tray, filling each cup about 2/3 full. Bake for 10 minutes and remove from the oven. Sprinkle the tops of the muffins with the granulated brown or white sugar and return the muffins to the oven to bake for an additional 10 to 15 minutes, until the tops are golden brown and a toothpick inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean. Cool for about 10 minutes in the pan before turning the muffins out.

So yeah… how was YOUR Sunday?

Funny enough, it’s the middle of summer and I’ve been cooking and baking a lot. Usually it’s too hot to bother with cooking, much less baking. We actually had a few cool days, so it wasn’t bad. Saturday I made my second loaf of Italian bread, a batch of blueberry muffins and dinner. Sunday, after boiling in the sun while picking blueberries, I came home and made BBQ Bacon Cheeseburgers and fresh sweet corn. Heck, last night I made bacon, eggs and toast for dinner after having made grits for lunch.

I’ve cooked more this summer than I usually do in the summer. It’s absolutely crazy. I suppose, though, I need to go get dressed and ready to head out to Rob’s doctor’s appointment. I still don’t wanna go. Blah. Guess I ain’t got much of a choice.

I was ambitious today. Seriously. I made Italian bread (in the bread machine, yes I am a cheater) and it turned out SO good. I’ve failed at simple white bread, I’ve failed at simple wheat bread, but my Italian bread came out almost perfect. It didn’t cave in for a change and it didn’t come out super heavy and yeasty. It’s a bit denser than I like, but it tastes absolutely fantastic. After the bread was out, I got dinner started. Whole roasted chicken with a light coating of olive oil just to get it crisp. To go with it was boxed (yep, cheated again) stuffing and instant (I cheat, sue me!) mashed potatoes with real, made from the chicken drippings, gravy.

I have been asked if I’m alright more times than I can count and I don’t understand why. I know I haven’t been posting much on livejournal lately, but there really isn’t a whole lot to post about. I get up, I do crap around the house, I futz around on the computer, I read, I watch TV, I play games, I go to bed and start all over again most of the time. Thusly, that is why there is usually only one ‘real’ update sometimes. So that’s the deal.

I’ve been monitoring blood sugar levels every few days for myself. My levels are super good, ranging in the 90’s, which is really great, considering they were afraid I was borderline diabetic. Meh. Rob’s levels are still high, but he’s going to the doctor sooner rather than later. Mom’s is a the high end of normal, so we’re not too worried.

I think that covers anything of interest.

Okay, so I’m officially annoyed with twitter.com. I can’t receive tweets from other people atm. No idea why, it says my ‘home’ page doesn’t exist, but my account is in tact, so it’s nothing I’ve done to get booted off. In a way, it’s okay because it’s one less distraction from the things I need to be doing. I should make a todo list of all the crap I need to do, but I don’t want to, I want to procrastinate some more.

While writing the rest of this post, my twitter got fixed. This is the result of it taking me 3 hours to write a post.

I spent much of my day either in the kitchen playing with a meat slicer or at the computer playing a game and listening to Leo Laporte. Seriously, I love my meat slicer. We sliced up a beautiful rib roast into 12 lovely steaks, all the same thickness and size. Those will make some lovely meals throughout the month. I also sliced up squash for stirfry. 4 lovely zucchini’s and 4 yellow squash, all cut to the same thickness for even cooking. So much nicer than I could do by hand and a LOT faster. Tonight, after Rob got home and we had dinner, I sliced up a large stick of pepperoni so that I can make pizza or calzones. We have a giant Lock ‘n Lock container full of pepperoni. More than I need for pizza, but it won’t go to waste.

I did try to make a strawberry milk tonight using fresh strawberries that we picked up yesterday, however that was an EPIC FAIL. I poured the berries into my blender then opened up a unopened half gallon of milk. Sniffed it, it smelled fine, took a sip.. tasted fine. Poured some into blender and it was… CHUNKY. Yeah all those fresh berries went down the drain along with an entire half gallon of milk. I’m not happy at all, especially with the sell-by date being July 10. I’m just glad I hadn’t done a shake and wasted ice cream.

I should be working on the deluge of blinkies that I have to make from before the monitor issues. I should also work on tagging my pictures on Flickr and Picasa. I should be working on a lot of different projects, including crocheting, reading Blood Noir and Kitchen Witch. Instead, I’m arguing about the difference in respect and being respectful with some overgrown children. Ah well.

Anyway, hope everyone had a lovely weekend and has a lovely week.

So, my sister had a bread machine she wasn’t using. I had mentioned that I wanted one, so she brought it down when they came for Christmas. I was excited, but it didn’t have a book, so it took me a bit to find a decent wheat bread recipe for it (thanks ). I finally put the ingredients together one day last week and set it up and such, lo and behold, it didn’t work.

Well, I got looking and found a really nice bread machine on amazon and Mom ordered it for me. We got the package today and I immediately decided to make bread. I’m so happy with it. I made whole wheat bread and it turned out really nice. Definitely easier than making bread by hand! Even if they do call me a cheater.
I sat and crocheted on the baby blanket for a while today, so I’m closer to done on that. I’m hoping one more round will be enough to do it so that I can trim it and get it shipped off. *bounce* Then I can move on to the pink and white blanket.