Monthly Archives: June 2011
Mad, Mad Meal Prep
I was very inspired by this post about prepping TONS of meals beforehand. It’s not really new or revolutionary (as she points out herself in a later post), but sometimes you read something and it just clicks with you, you know?
Anyway, I briefly considered heading to Costco, but I prefer to partner-shop with Dave at the really huge stores, and he’s away on a business trip at the moment. So I headed to our usual grocery store and loaded up on whatever meat was on sale. I also picked a few different marinade recipes and grabbed supplies for them too.
Ideal servings for the two of us work out to around 1.5 pounds total without bone (we love our protein), so when I got back home and took stock it looked like I had enough meat for 10 meals each. So I settled on 5 different marinade recipes that I wanted to try.
I doubled some of the recipes, but some looked like they were already enough for two 1.5 lb dinners. Then I laid everything out and started. Here’s how things looked at the start:
It was pretty relaxing, really. I had the music turned up and I settled into a bit of a rhythm. There’s something satisfying about going through 3 whole bulbs of garlic and actually using an entire ginger root for once.
I didn’t time myself or anything, but it must gave taken at least an hour? Anyway, here’s the resulting carnage:
And here are the bags of meat all nicely tucked away in the freezer:
We’re signing up for a cow share that will mean getting 20 lbs of meat every 3 months, so hopefully I can use this method to make that a bit more manageable…
Kitchen: Painted!
The painting action actually happened 2 or 3 weeks ago, but there’s a very limited time of day where the kitchen has good natural light, so I only got around to taking pictures today. If you’ve been following along, we knew we wanted to paint the living/dining room green from day one, and we wanted the kitchen a contrasting color. At first we picked up samples for what we thought were fairly greyish purple colors, but they turned out to be way too purple up on the wall. (See the end of this post.) So we went back for some even grayer samples, and finally picked a color.
And then we did nothing for 2 and a half months. The paint samples on the kitchen wall faded into the background (literally, I think you can see them in the background of 2 or 3 different blog posts) as we worked on other things. But finally we decided enough was enough, and we got ‘er done. I think we’re slowly improving at this whole painting thing, as we actually managed to finish all of the priming and painting in a single weekend for once. Or maybe we just had more incentive since we wanted our kitchen fully finctional? Anyway, enough delay, here are the pictures:
I love everything about it- the hue, the saturation, um, that’s all there is to color right? Heh. As best as I can tell, Dave loves it too, (he’s the one who suggested going this direction to begin with) but he feels the need to moan that it’s PURPLE. I reassure him that it’s a very manly color… the actual name of the shade is Gray Timber Wolf. What could be more manly? 🙂 Having this color on the walls really reinforces my desire to paint the cabinets white… I’m pretty sure they would look amaaazing…
Our favorite spot currently is where the gray wall meets the green in the dining room:
Sorry about the glare. >:| Here’s a view down at knee-level:
We actually left the wall by the pantry unpainted because I wanted it gray and Dave wanted it green. Dave’s right again, now that the rest of the kitchen is painted, I think this wall would look great in that same light green color as the living room and dining room.
Here’s a shot of that wall from the other side:
The urge to re-face the fireplace is rising…
Shower heads (easiest upgrade ever!)
Our itty bitty little shower in the master bathroom had a problem: an awkward handheld shower head that didn’t really fit. Oh, and it was super old, and if you adjusted it the wrong way it would start shooting water up against the unprotected back wall. ugh.
Since we aren’t trying to win any beauty contests, we just replaced it with the least expensive shower head we could fine. And it works great. Yay. (Sorry for the bad photos.)
Meanwhile, the hall bath had the opposite problem. It had a fixed shower head that barely managed to produce more than a trickle of water. Clearly I was so glad to be rid of it that I forgot to take a before picture. But once again we just bought the least expensive handheld we could find…
It’s a little funny looking:
But it serves it’s primary purpose–dog washing–perfectly!
The Letter K 