I always feel my posts lack colour, mainly because I'm hopeless at taking photos or rushing so I don't have time to find appropriate captions to add to them.
This was commented on when I mentioned making a lovely meatball dish on Friday - there was no evidence. (Although judging by 4 empty plates I think it was a hit.)
Well there's no real evidence of the lovely meal hubby cooked tonight but here is the recipe pic:
Parmesan crusted pork chops. We had green beans and carrots plus pak choi with ours and they were delicious. We also had a glass of the red stuff to wash it down.
Tomorrow I'm aiming for this:
Chicken shawarma salad.
This was interesting when doing the shopping - it requires sumac and ras el hanout for the marinade plus tahini for the salad dressing. I'd never heard of sumac or ras el hanout before. I also assumed that tahini would be with the dressings in the supermarket.
Ras el hanout is a North African spice mix and sumac is another spice used in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cooking.
I did a lot of wandering around the supermarket looking for these. (Never any staff to ask when you need them.) Thank goodness for Google. Not only did it help identify what I was looking for, when I added in Tesco (the supermarket) it also brought up pictures of the actual items. Made the searching a lot easier!
The chicken is now marinading overnight as recommended. Hopefully I might remember to take a pic of the finished dish tomorrow but don't hold your breath.
Well I've got some catching up to do here. I missed my news post on Friday, the Friday Faves that I've started doing and the SoCS post yesterday. I'm really slipping. Doesn't bode well for the A-Z Challenge!
I had an easy day on Friday. I was quite tired so I took it easy and made the mistake of getting hooked into one of the books I'd been bought at Christmas. Big mistake. I couldn't put the book down - well I did let it go when I dozed off in the afternoon! I'm feeling much better but still get tired quite easily. Pesky virus!
Anyway it was a good book (The life I left behind by Colette McBeth.) and reading helps with writing so they say. That's my excuse. I also put some of my CDs onto my iTunes so that I could add them to my iPod. That's another good sign of recovery. When I'm feeling ok I'm much more likely to be listening to music - have Adele playing right now. I love her new album.
I also instigated a date night with hubby on Friday evening. I had a gift card for Jamie's Italian for Christmas. That made me realise I'd already got one for my birthday we hadn't used so I decided on the spur of the moment to suggest to him that we met up at Westfield and ate out for a change. We're so predicatable. When we met and had got settled at the restaurant his comment was "We should do this more often." That is what we always seem to say when we go out to eat! But it was nice and the food was good. No room for dessert though.
Yesterday we joined most of his siblings at his Mum's house (which is now where his eldest sister is living) to sort through her things and see if there was anything we wanted in the way of keepsakes etc. It's always hard doing that sort of thing but it was nice being there with the others and we stayed and had dinner with them.
Today we had our daughter and youngest son and their spouses here for dinner. We also invited Nick's eldest sister and her husband as we've been at their place for several meals lately so it was definitely our turn to feed them. We only had a roast beef dinner but with all the trimmings and I made two desserts, a strawberry flan and a chocolate trifle. That's the sort of cooking I enjoy. Nothing too complicated but tasty! And I do love a nice dessert. Our daughter also brought a cheesecake with her so the diets were definitely broken today. Thankfully the dishwasher is in working order although it might protest a bit at overuse after all those dishes!
Well that's my catch up and it's a shame I didn't get around to doing the SoCS post yesterday - the prompt was food and I would have had plenty to write.
Time to check on the dishwasher. Have a good week.
