So...

So...I say that a lot. I just noticed. Sorry. Must be the cheesehead in me. You can take the girl out of northeast Wisconsin but you can't take the bad language habits out of the girl.

I really want to figure out how to take a picture and put it behind my title. I managed to finally put all my favorite blogs and a few websites in my sidebar over the past couple of days. I am getting there, slowly but surely.

I really want the pic of Baby (the top one on the right) as my title. We'll see if I ever actually get it there.

Now for food...

Monday's vegetable beef soup was even better tonight. I have enough left for a bowl at lunch tomorrow and it will be gone. Which is a good thing due to the packed fridge I am now dealing with.

I have been flipping through the new cookbook, "Complete Comfort Food" and have found some definite possibilities, some of which even The Man will eat...

I like what the editor says on page 26: "Cooking for yourself is all about pandering to your own palate, particularly so if your usual routine is to cook for a busy family. Choosing foods that you adore and tailoring a menu just for yourself can feel quite liberating, so make the most of time spent alone and catering for yourself." The section that this heads is called Spoil Yourself.

Ever since I began (mostly) eating a gluten-free diet, I am doing exactly that. Spoiling myself. I am trying foods I either hated as a kid and never touched again until now or attempting foods I have never tasted. AND LIKING THEM! I am looking forward to creating the evening's dinner in my mind in the morning before work and making it happen after 5. Grocery shopping is fun again (probably because with the Cookbook Box, I never know what I am going to get - it's a crapshoot). I am going beyond the tried-and-true recipes from family and old cookbooks and playing with favorites to make them new and fresh. I am loving every minute of it!

Former horrors included in the box are eggplant and squash. And cilantro (I think I am just seriously turned off by the smell). I hate to waste food so I need to come up with recipes stat.

The pictures in this cookbook are wonderful and make me want to take a bite right out of the page. Is paper gluten free?

Recipes I would like to make in my near future (not just from this cookbook):

hummus
cinnamon rings (a Mexican doughnut-like thing that I am going to have to try a GF flour combo to make)
roasted garlic and butternut squash soup
chicken flautas (gonna have to make GF tortillas for this)
Mexican spicy beef tortilla (see comment above)
amaretti cookies

I better stop now or I will lose my job because I have chained myself in my kitchen.

I picked up some nice-looking lamb chops last weekend at the store. I haven't had lamb since my first communion! I am trying to figure out how best to prepare it. Food for thought. Ha.

Other things to think about: how to prepare Thanksgiving side dishes I love and have them be GF and tasty. I think my dressing will be good with the GF bread I have in the house (Ener-G harvest loaf) because the focus of that is the meat and spices. The Man has insisted on my scalloped corn; I have a recipe for soup mix that I might use to make my own little dish of this. Cranberries - I make relish with pineapple and marshmallows. If marshmallows aren't GF, I will just skip them (note to self-check out marshmallows). Pumpkin pie. I am going to use Shauna's crust, I think. I really need to start playing with all the flours so I can come up with my own recipes.

And Christmas. There are 2 things I know for sure - I am giving my sister-in-law the holiday completely off for a change (The Man and I are hosting Christmas Eve) and I am making an Amish ham. The SIL makes a wonderful, horribly-fattening hash brown potato bake that would be perfect but (1) she isn't going to be allowed to cook and (2) if I make it or something like it, it will be GF and I will be able to eat it. I am thinking about hauling out some of the organic applesauce I canned in October. Dessert is already floating around in the brain - I am debating a black forest cake.

And what am I going to do about Christmas cookies? Do I wait to bake until I get the results of my test (about 2 to 3 weeks), which means all the mooches in all the land have to wait (they would be the people who find out I am making my enormous batches of Christmas sweets and mysteriously begin to hang out at the house when we haven't seen them for months and months)? Or do I forge ahead, make what the others want and expect, and make GF cookies just for me? Oh, the agony.

Every Christmas, I make 2 kinds of cookies specifically for me. The containers these cookies go into are marked "eat and die." Spritz. OMG. And Santa's Whiskers (sweet dough studded with maraschino cherries and almonds and rolled in coconut before baking so the coconut gets all toasty while baking into the cookie). Sigh. I WILL come up with a way to make both of these cookies again.

I've babbled long enough for tonight.