Daily Archives: 11/21/2002

Cooking up a Storm of Spicy Spuds!

Today is a quiet day in the office, with Lake Nasty meetings taking place sans Me upstate.

I’m exhausted.  Honestly, the last month is catching up with me.  I’m worn down!  Plus, I have been relishing my home time this week a little too much – my evenings go something like this:

  • Get home.  Eat a little something.  It’s generally 7:30 or 8 by now.
  • Sit on couch and knit and watch TV for a few hours.  Favorite shows:  7th Heaven, That 70’s Show. Malcolm in the Middle.  Other fave. shows of various roommates:  Ed, West Wing,  and others, including BBC world news.
  • Around 10:30 start toddling around like I’m ready to head up for bed.
  • Hit the sack around 11.  Read.  Favorite books to read in bed:  trashy trashy romance novels.  Louisa May Alcott books.
  • Speak to Matt around 11:30 or 12.  Go to sleep very late.

All that, and then waking up at 7:30 the next morning, on top of being pooped from the wedding, and even more on top of being pooped from working so hard from the last month, well, I’m a tired girl.

Yesterday I went straight home on the knitting bus.  That’s what I’ll always call it.  It’s a good bus. I love it.  From what I’ve read, knitting in public (or kip, if you’re down with the knitting lingo used on the inter-web) is supposed to garner strange looks and interested questions from strangers.  I barely ever get anything.  Maybe it’s that NY state of mind, where no one is supposed to look at anyone else and NO ONE is supposed to talk to a stranger.  Not that I’m looking for conversations with strangers, really, but the non plused silence just isn’t what I expected the first time I whipped out the knitting.

When I got home I went cooking crazy, with easy-peasy stuff. I made a pound of part-whole wheat spaghetti and used some of it with the end of this fantastic Thai peanut sauce that a buddy here at work made and gave me.  It’s so good and spicy and gingery.  I love it.  That was for my dinner.

On the rest of the spaghetti I did my tried and true spicy standby:  some chipotle-garlic spice tossed with some parmesan cheese.  (Michelle is a saint for having a big bag of grated cheese from Costco in the fridge.  It makes my throw-together cooking so much easier.)  I packed that for lunch some day.

We had some left over ugly potatoes that weren’t pretty enough for the potluck roasted potato dish, so I cooked ‘em up and mashed ‘em down.  Mmmm.  And, to tempt fate, I threw in some MORE chipotle-garlic spice, only I used the HOT kind, not medium, and sauteed some garlic in olive oil to add to the potatoes.  Yum.  Only, I added too much spice.  Lord knows how hot they’ll be today after the flavor sets!  And then the Ever Prescient Jen coined the term ‘spicy spuds’.  Mmm, spicy spuds.  How many times can I write Mmmm?  I think I’ll go for one more.

Mmmm.

Of course, today when I got into work I immediately heated up my spicy noodles and ate them for breakfast.  Er, brunch.  I have a really hard time when I bring my lunch to work – I just want to eat it immediately.  I’d say I have about a 60% success rate of waiting until lunch time to eat.  So, for lunch I went and got a sandwich.  Not the best way to watch what I eat.

There’s a mystery at work today – J. has roses on her desk!  But she’s at the tiger team meeting (rowr!) with El B., so who the heck knows where they came from!