fixing the site up

I upgraded this template to blogger's new version with the supposedly easier to use interface. I suppose if I hadn't tricked out my blog with CSS and HTML then I would be fine but I had so I am not. I have managed to get a background & the font colors are not too bad. I cannot get my Bloglines blog roll to work though. I keep getting a message about XML wants a ; after the command 'folder' or some such & if I put the ; where they want it the blog roll appears as a message saying 'user not found'. I suppose that will get sorted out by Bloglines eventually. I don't have the patience to learn XML at the moment. So I opened each blog I really like & added it manually

I spent yesterday surfing around, jumping from blog to blog and eventually added about 45 blogs to Bloglines, about half food and half parenting. I think I have 112 blogs at the moment, about half are digital scrapbooking related & the other half split between parenting & food, with a few about parenting and food. The blogger all sound like nice people, obviously some have known one another for awhile now. I hope to get to know at least some of them. but I think you have to post regularly to really get to know people & I just don't know if I will have the time. I'm on vaction right now with endless hours of someone else playing with my kids. So I can surf and scrap & post. but come Jan 1 real life begins & we'll see how it goes.

the glass 8x8 pan

DH came to me this evening and said "Where is the square baking pan? Is the 13x9 the smallest we have?" This is an odd question for him to ask me. He does most of the baking and nearly all of the dishwashing & putting away. Therefor he should have far more knowledge of our baking pans & their locations than I should. But *women know where things are* and I was able to say "We have a square glass one. It should be in the island cupboard, or inthe stove drawer, or under the sink. Or it might possibly be in the pantry" I keep the glass & silicon bakeware in island cupboard, the flat baking sheets in the stove drawer and the metal bakeware under the sink. Ceramic bowls go in the pantry. But I've never actually fully explained this system to DH, so he tends to leave clean bake pans on the counter for me to put away. I hadn't realized the connection until he asked me about the square pan. I would just get mildly irritated that he hadn't put the pan away, put it away myself & that would be that. This may be the reason why *women know where things are* and men don't - we simply forgot to tell them.

Anyway, a quick search through the aforementioned locations failed to turn up the square baking pan. My kitchen space-wise is average, storagewise is it tiny. There are really only 5 places a baking pan could be and one of those is the dishwasher. The other 4 I have already mentioned. It wasn't in any of them. It also was not in the cupboard with the glasses or the one with cereal, soup and other frequently used dry goods, nor was it hiding under the numerous mostly empty bag of stale tortilla chips. It was not in the refridgerator with something already in it. This meant it must not be in the house, though I had no recollection of taking it anywhere. The last time I used it, I think I baked tilapa in it. Not something you normally take to a pot luck.

We gave up & DH decided to make brownies in a round cake pan rather than make really really skinny ones in the 13x9 pan. He goes to rinse out the round pan in the sink and there, under the pile or small plastic bowls that accumulates in after a day with toddlers, was the square glass 8x8 pan. He washes it out, picks up the box of brownies and reads "Do not bake in square glass 8x8 pan."

Menu for the next 2 weeks

only need 8 meals this time. We had pasta for dinner tonight, we go out to eat Saturdays and Sunday we will be celebrating Yule (early) with my coven & having dinner there. Somehow the 4 meals I chose from the card catalog all ended up being Rachel Ray 's, (one for each book I own). The other 4 are standards of mine.

Crock pot chicken & stuffing
Chicken crescent pockets or calzone (leftovers)
Loaded baked potato soup & spinach salad
Rosemary & ham scones & more spinach salad
Turkey cutlets with ravioli - NEW!
Braciole
Fake tandori chicken
Mini meat patties

and if one of them doesn't appeal one night I have tilapia filets in the freezer ready to marinated in lemon & garlic and the broiled.

Next time I do a 2 week menu I have to come up with side dishes that are more than 'nuke some frozen peas' at least some of the time. Most of Rachel Ray's meals include side dishes. I just never make them because...well...I don't think I will like them. But the time has come to try them. So I am suspecting lots of Rachel Ray dinners in my future.

for the new year

My food goal for 2007 is to get a better handle on side dishes. While perusing my recipe card collection (which oddly has a very large section for 'veggies') I realized that most of my recipes I don't make that often. I've made nearly all of them once but rarely twice. And there are a bunch from this past year's cookbook purchases that have never been made at all. I've intended to make them, put them on menu, but then never got around to making them. For the past 2 months especially, the majority or my meals have been basic and for the most part recipe-less. Meatloaf, pasta, chicken with couscous, chicken in a crock pot, pot roast, london broil, broiled fish, pizza and things stuffed in crescent roll dough. Various pastas, various fish, various types of pizza and various things stuffed into crescent roll dough, to keep it from being too monotonous. But basically the same 9 dishes show up every 2 weeks. Occasionally I'll make something or other that found like Cooks Illustrated Coq au Vin but the last time I did that was in September. I've intended for a month now to make Turkey Tettrazini but haven't.

Part of the problem is at least 3 out of the 5 nights I cook, I am basically cooking for toddlers. Turkey Tettrazini has zero toddler appeal. Tyson's breaded chicken patties have toddler appeal. DH is supposed to come home by 6:30 but something tends to happen fairly often to screw that up & I cannot put off feeding the kids beyond that. They go to bed at 8. I find it frustrating to hear at 5:30pm that he won't be home until 7pm & if I have been having a stressful day with bickering boys, the news that I will be alone with demons for dinner often means toaster waffles with peanut butter rather than braciole. Cooking for myself just isn't that much fun. Cooking for the boys can be fun, if I am in the mood for pizza or pasta, but I'd like adult food, with adult people every now and again.

So another part of my cooking resolution for 2007 is to make a new meal for dinner twice a month, every other Sunday. On alternate Sundays I will make again a recipe I have made before, like Coq au Vin. Or at least I will try. Realistically at least one Sunday a month this won't happen. Random food will be eaten. That's fine. What I need is a plan. It's ok to deviate from the plan, but you have to have the plan firs