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Dinner tonight (+ lunches)

I am going away for the weekend, so I’d like to use up my perishables.

Foodstuffs with short lifespans
1-2 meal-worths of roasted beef
1-2 meal-worths of ham
3 small red bell peppers
2 yellow bell peppers
green beans
1/2 a small iceberg lettuce

eta:
1/3 a loaf of white sandwich bread
a few pocket pitas
Argh – yeah, and I have pears, too – I should check whether they are ripe yet
/eta

I think the green beans should go in a stir fry with the beef. If I cut them lengthwise, they’ll have a better texture after being frozen.

I think I will not try to make one big stir fry with all the ingredients because, while I could probably make it work, I’m a little horrified by the idea. Partly because the kind of stir fry with green beans should go over rice, but the kind with the lettuce should go with fried noodles. At least in my head.

So I’ve got ham running around. I could make the stir fry and freeze all of it and then make a dinner of ham, eggs, and toast. Or I could scramble them together, with some of the bell pepper, and put them in pita bread.

Okay, so that takes care of everything except a few miscellaneous slices of bread. I could toss them. I used the last of the milk last night, so bread pudding is out. Hmmmm… any ideas? Oh, yeah, and pears. You think I could cut up the pears, mix them up with some bread and brown sugar, bake it, and end up with something edible?

There’s hope that I might finally be getting a new supermarket! It has be vaguely under construction since it closed, but they do seem to actually be making progress recently. Yes I am excited about the cheaper groceries of greater variety – but I am even more excited about the public restroom. Oh my god, will people quit using the lot behind mine as a toilet? Don’t worry, there is a fence between my backyard and the lot, but when the supermarket was open, I could shortcut through the lot… not anymore!

Relaxing

It has been a lovely birthday weekend.

We had a party at work on Friday with pizza… and I brought in a lovely chocolate mousse cake with ganache. It was my first time buying something at The Restaurant School‘s pastry shop, but it was amazing. Then my parents took me out to dinner at a nice restaurant and then I met GeeksDoItBetterfor a midnight screening of Serenity!

Saturday, my actual birthday, I worked overtime and ate most of the rest of the cake. The weather has been good to me again. We were supposed to get lots of snow starting at 2pm, but the temperature stayed above freezing even until 10pm, when I was walking home… and then right after I got home, it started sticking

So I have spent all of Sunday in bed! I woke up at noon and 4pm. It’s now almost 8pm, and I am considering having breakfast. Also, I love my neighbor – for he has shoveled the walkway, even my steps and up to my door.

My kitchen needs more storage space

I have a small apartment, and in some ways it has been a good idea to limit my available storage space. I will fill anything… and that will just make it harder to move in the future. But I love my apartment, and I’m likely to stay here for a while.

So I am trying to figure out what to do with my available floorspace.

Option 1: Nothing.
Bonus: It keeps me from accumulating a whole lot of extra crap.

Option 2: Shelves
Can hold my cookbooks and extra pantry stuff… and, if the shelves end up sturdy enough, I could finally bring my mixer from my parents’ home.
Minus – omg, I already have enough food staples stored to hold out against a seige for a fortnight… but they could be in more visible locations so that I’d use them up… *cough* yeah, right, like I wouldn’t just fill the space because it was there… but I would move it all to a level where I didn’t need a stepstool to get to the ketchup.

Option 3: Chest freezer
I can steal all the 8 year old beef that is filling the bottom of my mother’s chest freezer and I can have more room to store my own stuff without having to keep 40 lunches at work.
Minus – I will hoarde food and possibly not get around to eating it, either. And what’s the point of having room to get free meat, if I’m going to spend $150 to get it? Also, it doesn’t solve the book storage problem. Do they make hutches to go over chest freezers, like an etagere?