Crockpot Beef Soup
I’ve invented a new tasty soup very loosely based on the Hamburger soup that my mom makes. There are some major changes, including the fact that it’s made in the crockpot, and the fact that it does not contain barley (the grocery store near me sells four kinds of barley, none of which look like the stuff my mom uses in soup, I gave up in confusion).
The ingredients were all thrown together in the crockpot last night. I had originally intended to brown the beef and some of the vegetables, to be honest I’m glad I didn’t as the chunks of beef were super tender and fell apart in the mouth much better than they would have if pre-browned, based on my experience.
I used:
- One can of diced tomatoes
- Two cups of beef broth
- Two marinating steaks, cubed
- Three large peeled potatoes, cubed
- Two stalks of celery, sliced
- Two carrots, sliced
- One can of corn
- Two cloves of garlic
- A good dash of Worcestershire sauce
- Ground black pepper
I put the crockpot on this morning, on low and just let it cook all day. I came home to perfect beef soup. It’s almost half way between a soup and a stew. Yum.
Jogging Update
Hubby and I are still jogging. We are advancing very very slowly through the couch to 5k program. We started out advancing at the recommended rate, but every time we moved up a level we ended up feeling miserable. So now we spend two to three times as long at each level as the website suggests, and we’re loving it again.
Last night was the best jog we’ve had in ages. We quit listening to music while jogging a while ago because I found that I was keeping time to the music, even when that wasn’t an appropriate running tempo, and it seemed to be wearing me out too quickly. So last night we were jogging along when we realized that we hadn’t had to stop our conversation when we switched from our three minutes of walking back to five minutes of jogging. Needless to say, I’m very proud of us.
I’ve definitely learned that there’s no one-size-fits-all jogging program. Even though this program is great, it still isn’t perfect for us, and we have more fun by slowing it down. I figure we’re still out moving two or three nights a week, which is a huge improvement from the couch potatoes we used to be.
How Marriage Changed my Eating Habits
I do not consider myself a particularily picky eater. I like a wide variety of foods, however there are a few things that I don’t care for. The major ones are: cheese, coffee and coconut. A little over a year ago, that list would also have included tea and red wine, but then I got married and everything changed.
I was converted first on the issue of tea. I could drink tea before, but I wouldn’t normally chose to. About the only times I ever had a cup of tea were when visiting my Nana and Grandad at the retirement home, because they didn’t really keep anything else on hand to offer, and I didn’t like to refuse they’re hospitality.
Then, the day after our wedding Hubby noticed that there were instructions on the coffee maker for how to make hot chocolate using it. Knowing that I love hot chocolate, Hubby offered to make some for me. Once he got the water going however, he realized that there were no packages of hot chocolate among the tea and coffee packages. Feeling bad that his nice gesture wasn’t working out, I agreed to his offer to make me tea instead (he knew better than to even suggest coffee) and I was amazed to discover that it was really, really good.
At first I thought it was just the awesomeness of having my new husband make tea for me that made it taste good, but I had tea several more times over the course of our Honeymoon, and it stayed enjoyable. In fact, I now start most days with a cup of tea.
The red wine conversion started earlier, but took longer to take full effect, and in fact, I still prefer white wine to red, except when eating red meat. My first good interaction with red wine occured at the wine and cheese shower that a very good friend threw for me right before my wedding. She had paired the wines with the perfect foods (and then left the cheese out of my servings). It was there that I discovered that red wine really does work exceptionally well with roast beef. However, away from these perfect pairings I still didn’t like it much, and chose white wine every option I got.
Then, on our Honeymoon, Hubby and I went on a wine tour (for anyone who’s never been, Prince Edward County, Ontario has an awesome wine industry). Once again I was exposed to really good red wine, and I was in a romantic mood. Between the two factors, I really enjoyed it. In the year and a bit since then, we’ve been gradually drinking up the shower gifts and wine tour purchases. Alot of that was red wine, and I’ve discovered that really, I actually kinda like the stuff.
My Dad is still holding out for marriage to change my feelings toward cheese I believe, but I just don’t see that one happening. However two years ago I wouldn’t have expected to like red wine, so I guess you never know.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Hubby, my sister and I celebrated Thanksgiving yesterday with a big turkey dinner. Because we’re halfway across the country from the rest of our family, it was just the three of us, but that didn’t stop me from making enough food to feed an army.
I’ve only made thanksgiving dinner once before, last year. That was the year I got to transition from person who makes the gravy while Mom does everything else to person who teaches sister to make the gravy while doing everything else. Among other things it involved about six phon ecalls to either my mother or mother-in-law with questions such as: which way up does the turkey go?
This year, I can proudly say that I did not have to phone home once. That’s right, I made turkey dinner all by my self. And I’m more than a little proud of it. We had an almost 20 pound turkey (yes, there were only 3 of us, we like leftovers) Grandma-style stuffing (bread with a bit of sausage), mashed potatoes, mashed yams, peas and carrots, dinner rolls, corn and the all important blue jello with fruit in it. For dessert, my sister brought a home made pumpkin pie.
I even did such a good job prepping stuff early in the day, that around four o’clock I had an hour to kill with nothing to do. The turkey was cooking. The yams were cooked once, mashed with sugar and waiting to go back in the oven. The potatoes were peeled and sitting on the stove waiting to be cooked. The table was set. And I was going crazy. I’m not good at waiting, at all. Hubby had to distract me with video ganes just to get me to stop going in circles.
It was a very successful meal, we are still very full people. We’ve already dug into the leftovers, with hot open face turkey sandwiches for lunch today. Hubby’s talking about trying to invent turkey curry for dinner, and I plan to make turkey broth either tonight or tomorrow. Yum.
Fantasy Novel Addiction
I’ve always been hooked on books. And for many years fantasy was among my favourite genres. A few years ago I went off fantasy a bit. This wasn’t for any particular reason, but I guess I got a bit sick of it. Earlier this year I got back into fantasy big time.
Hubby had a couple of books by Brandon Sanderson, and I had some of Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth books. I’ve posted earlier about us guessing back and forth at the contents of books the other had already read. Well, I’ve caught up to him on Brandon Sanderson, and I’ve taken the lead with the Terry Goodkind.
After reading the first Terry Goodkind in about two days, the second took me almost three weeks, due to a visit from my parents in the middle. I’ve been rationing the books, as attempts to reread this series in the past have usually ended with me getting bored about 2.5 books in (not that the third book isn’t good, just too much of a good thing).
The result has been me going crazy. I’ve forced myself to read at least one non-fantasy novel in between each of the Sword of Truth books that I’ve been reading. I spent Friday night rushing through the end of a Susan Howatch family saga novel, so that I could start book 4, Temple of the Winds, on Saturday. Since I started it yesterday afternoon, I’m now 240 pages into it. I predict I’ll be done by the end of the week, and will then rush through a random other book until I can read book 5. Terry Goodkind=awesome. book rationing=works beautifully for me.
Stupid Computer
My computer, as they are known to sometimes do, has screwed up. For some unknown reason, my computer has decided that no one, including me, has permission to open the latest version of the research proposal that I have been working on for the last several days.
I’ve lost about a day’s worth of work assuming that the computer doesn’t decide to get it’s act together and let me in sometime soon. This isn’t the end of the world, obviously. It does however make me very, very annoyed. I have a super busy week coming up (at least the early part) even without this, so I’m thoroughly unimpressed. In fact, I’m so annoyed with Macspiffy (yes, it’s a mac, and I tend to think it’s spiffy, therefore MacSpiffy) that I’ve been “not talking to it” for the last few minutes. I’ve relented because I like the internet more than I’m mad at the computer.
I’m reasonably certain that it is gone, because Hubby did his communing with electronics thing, and got no results. If he can’t get it to work, then no one that I know is going to get it to work, short of paying money which I’m not willing to do. Now I get to waste a whole day redoing that part of the proposal. And I can guarantee that I won’t be as happy with the redone version of it, as I was with the original.
After
I’ve just finished reading After by Francine Prose. It’s a young adult novel that my sister loaned to me. I find that I still really enjoy alot of young adult novels. The Giver by Lois Lowry is still one of my favourite pieces of dystopia, and I’m a huge fan of many series aimed originally at children/teens such as Emily of New Moon, and of course Harry Potter.
I can’t say that I loved this book though. It wasn’t bad, but some parts of it seemed completely improbable to me. The book is about highschool turning into a prison. It’s really about the step by step oppression of a group of people, and how no one stops it when it’s supposedly done for that group’s own safety. The book is set immediately after a school shooting at a nearby school. Ok to that point I can follow it.
However, the administrator who is oppressing them is a one dimensionally evil character who seems to have no reason for what he does. And the parents of the studen’ts seem to have been brainwashed through emails from the school. I understand that some people can be very persuasive, but this administrator was sending children away for an unknown length of time, and they’re parents weren’t objecting. I just couldn’t believe that; and it tinged the rest of the story for me. Once there’s one thing that I can’t accept, it’s much harder to get into the book.
Having said that, I did enjoy many aspects of the book. It was a frightening insight into what it might be like to be part of a group who’s rights are eroded, step-by-step, for their own “safety”. I read the book in one sitting in an afternoon the other day, and spent the evening Googling Stalin and Hitler and reading about real life situations of oppression.
I’m not sure that I would recommend this book to anyone, but I wouldn’t try to talk someone out of reading it either (not that I ever do). It certainly made me think.
The Week of Feeling Unwanted
This post may be a bit whiny, as it truly hasn’t been a good week. None of these things are a big deal on their own, but they did add up to me feeling a bit as though nobody wanted me (except Hubby of course, who has done a very good job of making me feel better.)
It started out with my parents heading home. Mom in particular really didn’t want to leave, so I cerntainly wasn’t feeling rejected per se, but I did go from being super busy with houseguests, to not having anyone around. Then my sis got sick, and moved some plans from Tuesday to Thursday, again no big deal, and she was sick, but the change happened Tuesday morning which kind of threw me off.
This was followed up by some school related issues. I need to put together a committee of people to supervise my thesis. I talked to my main supervisor about this, and he suggested the appropriate professors to ask, and approximately what to say. At this point, I was under the impression that it was basically a given that they’d say yes (I think my supervisor was too). The first guy said yes, however he first joked somewhat awkwardly (and I think somewhat seriously) about if there was any way he could get out of it. Not exactly flattering.
The second guy threw me for a total loop by saying that he didn’t think he was the right person to help on this thesis. I admit at this point I was a bit stunned. Luckily, my supervisor seemed equally surprised, so I felt a bit better about it at that point, but it did really throw off the rest of my week.
That night we had the departmental barbeque that happens every year. I like the barbeque, and I like the people in the department, but I’m quite shy. After a few minutes of having talked to the people I know, I spent a while following Hubby around. Overall I had a good time, but I did feel a bit like a wallflower. Normally wouldn’t have bothered me, but this week it was just one more thing.
Then, the piece de resistance on Thursday was when I got stood up for lunch by a girlfriend who completely forgot that we were supposed to meet. I’m still a little steamed about that one, as I stood around like a starving idiot for half an hour in the student union building before hubby came along looking for lunch himself, and we joined up.
The rest of the week was fine, and mostly I’m over it, but hopefully next week everyone will actually want me.
Weekend at Whistler, or Megan Rediscovers her Fear of Heights
We spent this past weekend at Whistler. It really was pretty awesome. I can totally understand why people love that place so much, and I wasn’t even there during ski season. Although I did discover just how much more outdoorsy most people who go there are compared to me.
We spent some time watching the end of the mountain bike runs, and went near the beginning of some hike trails, but my parents weren’t really up for hiking, and Hubby and my sister were busy. They chose to take advantage of actually having one another’s presence (as the only two daredevils in the family) to go Zip treking. As ziptrek sounded more like something that would make me cry than have fun, I elected not to join them. They claim it was awesome.
Instead Mom, Dad and I took the gondola to the roundhouse. This turned out to be a bit frightening. I haven’t been in a position to notice it in a while, but I am TERRIFIED of heights. Being up high on a mountain didn’t scare me. However being up above the mountain on a gondola did. I held on tight to the bar, and convinced myself that by holding on I was driving.
Once we got up that far, Dad went to sit in the Roundhouse, and Mom and I made the 5 minute walk down to where the chair lift to the peak starts. Originally I was just going to walk her down there, but then we saw a little old couple getting off the lift, and I figured that if they could do it so could I. That wasn’t my brightest moment.
I have to confess that I was in tears by the time we reached the top. The chair approaches multiple shear rock faces, where you think they must be the top, only to go over and have the ground fall away under it again. By the time we finally got there my knuckles were white. Luckily despite all my apprehension, down was significantly better than up. I was worried that facing downhill would make things scarier, but for some reason this wasn’t true. I did however make my parents buy me a beer for courage before I agreed to get back into the gondola down the mountain.
