I haven’t been the most faithful blogger, have I?

The last couple few months have been sort of…hard.  A lot of little things that aren’t such big deals on their own kind of adding up and making it difficult to find nice things to say.  Such as:

• My husband made a large, unauthorized purchase.  I am still trying to devise the appropriate punishment.
• My mother married my uncle and moved an hour and a half away.  This was also unauthorized.
• I injured myself and could not exercise for nearly 3 weeks.  Which in itself is enough to make me cranky (exercise is my stress reliever) but also I was taking a pain medicine that I believe was making me anxious and unreasonable.
• Our dog died the Tuesday before Christmas.  I was out of town for work at the time.
• Someone very close to me has been going through some really hard family stuff and there’s absolutely nothing I can do to help.
• I got a ticket for rolling through a stop sign on New Year’s Eve.
• We began having these weird power surges in our home and couldn’t figure out what the issue was.  It all came to a climax on our anniversary when we blew a breaker on the pole outside of the house… at 8:30 pm while I was in the basement on the treadmill.  (Imagine being thrown off a treadmill in pitch darkness.). And then my husband almost died because I almost killed him over a half-baked DiGiornio pizza.
• Work has been either feast of famine… and each is stressful in its own way.
• I found out I have emphysema.  Which explains a lot about my recurring bronchitis and why cough medicine never seems to help as much as it should.

BUT IN OTHER NEWS.

I made dinner last night.

My brother and I got my dad and stepmom iPhones for Christmas.  I put them on my data plan.  Since they do not have wi-fi at home, they needed to come over to my house and install the latest software updates.  I also needed to change some settings on their phones to see if I could stop them from blowing through our data so quickly.  (What did they do with themselves before they had iPhones?  I don’t know.)

So I invited them over for dinner.

I made Beef Tortellini, an old recipe I’ve had for a while but I think this is the first time I tried it.  My edits to the recipe:

• I started 2 cups of water boiling on the oven while I put everything else together.  By the time I had everything else in the crockpot, the water was boiling, and I added two teaspoons of beef bouillon granules to the water for the beef broth called for in the recipe.  Granules dissolved really quickly.  Easy peasy.  Don’t buy beef broth pre-made if you can help it.  This is so much cheaper and less waste.
• I didn’t brown the meat.  I never do when I’m making things in the crockpot.  I believe it’s a wasted step.
• I used one teaspoon of minced garlic, because we are not huge garlic people.
• I used about 30 oz of marina sauce.
• Didn’t have fresh green beans.  Had a 12 oz bag of frozen cut green beans, which I let thaw overnight.  Probably wasn’t necessary to thaw them though.
• I used 2 teaspoons of dried parsley.  (The rule for converting fresh spices to dried, is use about a third of what you would use if you were using fresh.  The recipe called for 2 tablespoons of fresh parsley.  A teaspoon is about a third of tablespoon.)
• I used 1/4 teaspoon of dried rosemary, approximately the same logic as for the parsley.  Roughly.  It’s ok.
• I couldn’t find 9 oz packages of refrigerated cheese tortellini, Walmart only had 20 oz.  I used the entire 20 oz package.  I think it would have been too soupy otherwise.  And adding the tortellini in 30 minutes before and turning the crockpot on high worked perfectly.  (That always makes me nervous, adding things in the crockpot at the end, not sure why.)
• I put the stuff on about 10 am, added the tortellini at 4:30 p.m. and we ate at 5 p.m.  So, total, 7 hours cooking time.

It was a good meal.  I served it with just salad.  My husband did go back for a seconds, although I could tell it wasn’t his favorite.  But at least he didn’t complain.  I think next time I would serve it with shredded parmesan cheese.

I also made banana cake, because I had some over-ripe bananas to get rid of.  I have two banana cake recipes, one calls for sour cream and the other calls for buttermilk.  I was actually going to make the buttermilk version, but when I got to the store all they had was half gallons of buttermilk, and I did not need that much, so I switched to the sour cream version.  Made the cake exactly per the recipe, but I used whipped cream cheese frosting…although the frosting in the recipe looks interesting and gets great reviews.  Just wasn’t feeling that adventurous… and couldn’t see buying instant coffee just to make cake icing.

Anyway, the cake was definitely the star of the show.  Dad went back for seconds (so did I), Tarzan had a huge piece, and my stepmom requested to take some home with them.

Here’s to a better 2018!