Party of two

When "The Office" came back from winter hiatus, Pam tried to foster a happy office environment by starting a New Year's Resolutions chart. Andy, who is routinely spurning by romantic interests, resolves to master cooking for one. After my mental chuckles subsided, I thought to myself, "Damn, too true." The world (at least the world of groceries) seems designed for families of four, and cooking for one or, in my case, two is a challenge.

Last week I made Pineapple Salsa Chicken for dinner (should that be capitalized, as it is the title of a recipe? Who knows) and I had to cut the recipe down from 6 servings to 2. There were problems from the get go, as I didn't have the requisite slow cooker, but I felt confident after googling some conversion times. I wound up using 2 chicken breasts, figuring that there were 2 of us so a breast a piece sounded fair (har har har). Not so. We ate no fewer than 3 separate meals from those 2 pineapple-d salsa-ed chicken breasts, and it could have been more had we not been desperate to finish it off in the third sitting.*

That said, I'm working on it. On Friday we ate our first meal in which nothing needed to be put in Rubbermaids and stuck in the refrigerator. Oddly enough, it was meatloaf. I have a bit of a thing with meatloaf. As a child, I ate it happily, devouring meaty slices on a bi or tri-weekly basis. Then recently I became seriously grossed out about it, and the fact that it was literally a loaf of meat. Just a ball of ground up beef. I am grimacing as I type this, by the way. Anyway, I saw this Nigella recipe online and it came highly reviewed, so I thought I would take a chance.

• 1 lb sausage meat (I went with sweet Italian)
• 1 lb ground beef
• 1 C quick-cooking oats, not instant oatmeal
• 1/3 C A.1. steak sauce (or store brand, you know, whatever)
  
• 2 eggs, beaten
• 2 t Worcestershire sauce
• 1 t kosher salt or 1/2 t table salt

Preheat the oven to 400. Combine all of the above in a bowl, mixing really well with your hands or a fork. Divide the mixture into 12 balls, then shape them into mini loaves. Set the mini meat loaves on a foil-lined baking sheet with a little space between them. Cook for 30 minutes.

I cut the recipe in half, and wound up making four mini meatloaves.

While those were in the oven, I made some roasted corn and a brown rice medley from Trader Joe's to go with it. And, voila! A perfectly portioned meal for two.

The mini loaves were flavorful, moist, and supremely tasty. Steven said that, for whatever reason, there is something much more appealing about eating a mini (heart shaped) loaf than a slice, and I think I agree.

In non food related news, I went to Sally Beauty Supply yesterday. I had run out of base coat and the polishes that I have been wearing lately started to peel after maybe 2 days of wear. Unacceptable. So I purchased Orly Bonder, which is a rather unappealing shade of orange in the bottle but I can assure you it applies clear. My bottle of Seche Vite had also gotten rather thick (such are the perils of using an ultra fast drying top coat) and I noticed a coupon entitling the purchaser of a bottle of Seche Vite to a free China Glaze nail polish. Score. I scanned the racks before narrowing it down to "Secret Peri-winkle," which looks just like you might think, or "Unplugged," a bronzy, rosy, brown shade. Here is what I chose:

It's brighter than it looks in the picture, and I really love it. I have picked up this color dozens of times but always put it back because I felt like I owned something similar. Wrong. I have nothing that sits right in the middle of blue and purple. The ultimate blurple polish. All in all, a very successful trip to the store.

* All complaining aside, the chicken was very delicious and the leftovers made excellent quesadillas.

On boredom and desks

The drawbacks of being unemployed are vast. For starters, there is the obvious lack of money and the crippling fear that you will no longer be able to pay your bills. Another drawback is the boredom. When I was living at home I could combat this by keeping odd hours. This allowed me to sleep late and stay up all night, perusing the internet for bizarre things. Now that I am out on my own, I have to follow the sleep schedule of the household breadwinner. I get up when Steven does, and usually am asleep within an hour of him. This gives me roughly 8-10 daytime hours to try to fill with activities.

All this spare time allowed me to tackle a project that I had been mulling over for the last few months. When I was but a wee girl, my parents decided that they would turn our attic into a playroom for me and my two older brothers (my sister, Taylor, was just a toddler then, and letting her loose in the rickety attic of 100+ year old house wouldn't have been advisable). This "remodel" mainly consisted of the three of us choosing paint colors for our respective areas and covering any gaping holes in the floor with thick carpet. For now I won't talk about how our interpretation of sponge painting looked more like the house had sprung a rare pox, I will just focus on the desk. My father (who probably now would be labeled as a mild hoarder) found a broken desk out on someone's curb, and like many other things that he has found, felt that we needed to keep it. He mended the legs and put it in my corner of the attic. Over the next few years, we collectively realized that due to the frigid temperatures in the winter and the sweltering heat of the summer, the attic wasn't an ideal play place and the desk was moved to the bedroom that Taylor and I shared. For a while it was home to an ancient desktop computer but over time it became a place for me to stack (horrible, embarrassing) CDs and a place for my sister to stick her gum.

When we moved to our new house about 5 years ago, my sister and I finally got our own rooms and I had custody of the desk once again. At this point, some 11 or 12 years after acquiring it, the desk was a little worse for wear. Now that it wasn't buried under heaps of clothes and miscellanea, the desk looked dated and kind of junky. I had considered painting it, but that would require buying materials, and sanding it, and actually having to clean it out. And who really wants to do those things when Judge Judy is on and you are kind of tired anyway? Well, when Steven and I were assessing which furniture to bring with us into our new apartment, I felt somewhat protective of that old desk. Sure it was caked in gum and Sanrio stickers, but I couldn't just leave it. So we loaded it into the U-Haul and I got motivated.

I wish I had thought to take a picture of it before I got started. It was only after I sanded and primed it that I thought, "Ooh! Maybe this will turn out nicely and I can do a before and after!" Well, it's going to be more of a during and after. Here is a picture of the desk all primed and ready to be painted. This step was easily the grossest and most horrible as there are few things worse that touching gum that has been in a mouth that is not your own. If you want to imagine the before, picture orange-y wood and also, inexplicably, glitter in some drawers.

The following day I was up bright and early, ready to paint. After two coats of "Pins and Needles" the desk was looking infinitely better, but I really didn't want to put the old handles back on. There was nothing really wrong with them, but they were the same brass handles that has been packaged with every piece of wood furniture ever assembled. My desk deserved better.

So Steven and I ventured to Home Depot to look for new handles and also tiny nails for another side project. The handles there were nicer and certainly more modern, but nothing really matched the idea I had in my head. Nearly ready to give up, we ventured further down that aisle to a wall of silver fixtures, mainly intended for use in a sterile bathroom environment. And then I saw it. Handles better than those I could even dream of, and ON CLEARANCE. It was as if the fates had aligned just for me to have a marvelous desk.

I still have 3/4 of a quart left and am resisting the urge to paint the guest bathroom to match.

Hi, it's me.

First a disclaimer for anyone I do not know who may come across this blog:
The purpose of this blog is to keep my family, friends, and anyone else who cares updated on my new (hopefully) fabulously Southern life in North Carolina. I do not claim to be especially cute, funny, creative, or unique.