I go to check on my little brother and what do I find? A zucchini!

I did enjoy leftovers all week. And I have been sitting here wondering if the $38 was worth it, given how long I ate the leftovers. So here's a rough calculation. I made the first meal on Friday, so one meal, and then had about 2 meals per day from either of the two dishes from Saturday to Saturday. So that means I ate a total of 15 meals from the two dishes. 38/15=2.53. So that means I spent about $2.53 on each meal that I ate this week. Huh. Feeling pretty good about myself right about now.

I did buy some fruit this week. Cherries were on sale for $1.47/lb. And I bought a 5 lb box of blueberries for $6. Amazing price. And they taste so good.

I know, I thought it too, five pounds is totally ridiculous. But I froze about 3 lbs, or 3.5 lbs. So they will be fantastic for muffins and smoothies for a really long time. Yay.

And a week is not complete or satisfying without at least one cooking battle to share.

A coworker brought the abundance from her garden to work on Thursday. All zucchini and cucumbers. So of course I grabbed some. And decided to make zucchini bread.

It was an absolute disaster.

And of course I want to say, "I even followed the recipe!" But I actually didn't. I guess part of what I am discovering here is that I am really bad at following directions. Really, really bad.

So I followed the recipe (except I omitted the sugar) up until it said mix dry ingredients with wet until combined. Well, that produced yuckiness. Half of the bowl was still dry ingredients while the other half was a barely combined attempt at dough. So naturally I just started adding water. I know what kind of consistency I am going for here, so I just kept adding water (and some almond milk, you know, for a more creamy consistency) until it looked like the right consistency.

Then I baked a batch. I prefer muffins to bread loaves, so I just scooped it out into my muffin tins. They came out, and immediately fell, and are these super dense half-size muffins. Weird.

Of course I am open to suggestions on what I did wrong, and I'd love a good zucchini bread recipe if you have one. Even if it has gluten, I'm working on the whole modifying thing.

You're cleaning so hard I'm afraid you're going to stick the dog in the dishwasher.

I spent the weekend cooking. I finished both of the recipes. Here is what my kitchen looked like after.



Both recipes were very good, so I am going to enjoy the leftovers all week.

I also baked bread this weekend. Last weekend, I make bread with a mix, and realized afterward how much sugar was in it. Bummer. So I tried a recipe from scratch. It called for 1/4 cup of sugar, but I just put in a tablespoon of honey. It turned out really well.

But today we're going to learn an entirely new recipe with lima beans.

I agreed to do an interesting task. The writer of one of the food blogs I read is publishing a new cookbook. So she has asked for people to test the recipes. I volunteered and was assigned two recipes to test. I can't tell you anything about the recipes, but I can tell you that I went shopping for the ingredients today. It required me to go to 3 different stores, and cost $38.09.

All I can say right now is I hope these are divine, and that there are a LOT of leftovers.

As a bonus though, I went to a new part of town, and found a nice and close super Walmart. I know, it's evil, but cheap food and better selection than Aldi. And right across the street is a fancy Whole Foods-type store. And best of all they have a pancake and waffle mix that didn't have any sugar in it.

We'll just wrap you in tinfoil and you can go as a leftover.

Well, I finished the week with leftovers. Leftovers both from Heather's visit (pasta salad, eggs and sausage) and leftovers from lunch with my friend (salad, and stir fry). I made one run to the grocery store and got $10.27 of produce (banana, peaches, plums, broccoli, and seaweed).

I also went to the farmer's market. I spent $5 on peaches, $1.25 on squash, and $1 on cucumbers. Then I splurged. I went to a craft fair and there was a stand selling sugar-free jam, so I bought a jar ($7) of strawberry rhubarb.

And then, in true "If you give a mouse a cookie" fashion, because I bought jam, I had to bake bread. So I did.

And in the morning, I'm makin' waffles!

I should be working on something productive for work. But you can only grade for so many hours of the day. Seriously.

So I'll update you on my food life. My sister came to visit (a fabulous part of my real life). So I stocked up on all kinds of treats, snacks, and really good food. And we discovered that we (both of us together) are just like our mom. We prepare and pack way too much food. And then we decide to buy ice cream from the stand. And it was good.

We ate picnics, ate out, had pancakes, went to a barbecue. Oh, that was a good lesson learned. I will never buy the Arrowhead Mills brand of pancake mix again. I prepared them according to the package directions, and they were awful! Fortunately it made a very small batch, so I threw them away. Then I made another batch with some serious modifications (good thing I've been making so many muffins, I've learned some of the modifications that work). The second batch was much better, but I still won't buy that mix again.

Today I polished off the leftover pasta salad. Since it is named after Heather, I made it for her. We like to take that on our picnics.