Living in Africa for two weeks reaaaaally makes you miss good ole American food. Last year, only a few days before the trip ended we found ourselves craving pizza and mayo and pickles and chips and salad and fruit etc etc. This year, we knew how long it would be without a cube of ice or a piece of real grain fed beef or a tiny speck of processed, sugar infused, carb loaded deliciousness.
And I am pretty sure we worked ourselves up to fail. Because by day two we were already craving Mackenzie River. And Wendy's. And Olive Garden.
It was bad.
I even started to miss cooking. I was planning out meals that I wanted to cook for months to come. I was day dreaming about grocery shopping and doing the freaking dishes. I was sick. I was planning out meals I didn't know anything about but I wanted to cook some AMERICAN food so bad, and eat some freaking green food, that I could hardly stand it.
So Evan and I went grocery shopping yesterday. I really need to a) learn how to manage this daunting task (because we spent one hundred and thirty three dollars and got nothing besides a jar of pickles and tempura batter. We didn't even remember the veggies. Seriously.) and b) learn how to plan my meals out for a week.
The only problem with this is I have this fear that what sounds good now will not sound good on Thursday when I am planning on making it. And I don't know how to shop to have enough food in my house to have a back up plan or two. And I know that this is just a big dumb irrational fear because I have planned meals out days in advance before only to find myself so excited for that meal that I do nothing but drool over it for days. So there really is no problem there. It's just that I need to learn how.
Anyway, I'm a proud, proud member of thenest.com (which is like thee best website, ever. For everything you ever need to know about anything and some of the best people you've ever wanted to hate if you love looking at beautiful houses.) and in one of the e-mails I recently received were some easy peasy slow cooker recipes. I am not a fan of stews. My parents loveeeeed making stews when I was a kid and I dreaded those nights. The meat was always really chewy and would get stuck in your teeth and they used the biggest carrots anyone has ever seen straight from their garden and it was all around just gross.
But I found this recipe for "Sweet and Sour Beef Brisket" and I think the picture is what did me in. I decided we needed to have this for dinner and boy did we.
Ask Evan. It seems like every time I make dinner I say that this is one of the best meals I've ever had.
Like Thai Coconut Curry. Or Pizza Fondue. Or steak. Or burgers.
But this beef brisket was seriously 100% hands down the best stew I've ever had. And one of the top 3 things to come out of my kitchen.
And, one of the best parts was the fact that it started cooking at 1 so I had to suffer through the smell all afternoon. I kept opening the lid and tasting it, pissing Evan off, but I couldn't keep my hands off of it. It was that good.
And I don't get that excited about food.
I also made mashed potatoes with garlic, cream, and onions. And those, my friends, were ahhhhhmazing as well. I love mashed potatoes but my parents are lazy and they're the box o' potatoes kind of people. And they are surely missing out.
And now I'm pretty sure I just want Evan to go find himself a real job so I can just stay at home and cook dinner all the time.
And I want to plan out my next meal so I can continue to wow my pants off.
But we had some wine, we are being overcome with jet lag, and we gorged ourselves so full that our eyeballs are popping out, so I think it's bed time.
And yes it is 8:41 pm and yes I will probably wake up at 6 am. But that's okay. I like being an adult. =]
LC
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