Kitchen Notes

I felt like such a kitchen wizard this week because we managed to not eat out for four nights - even for lunch. The only things that were wasted was an onion that went South surprisingly fast and a quarter of an apple pie. That's a first for our household - I don't think there has ever been an instance of dessert going to waste!

It all started with $75 in groceries at Safeway on Saturday and two Crockpots going on Sunday. The comic expo took up so much mental energy that even thinking of something as simple as slicing up a cucumber was too much to think about. I was hustling down the street to the boutique grocery, Sunterra, for lunch and everything else.

But it was with some wonder when I sat down on Saturday morning with a cup of tea and my best bird friend by my side that I plotted a week's worth of eating. The mania that I used to feel at the prospect of cooking a month's worth of meals back in day has long subsided - a week at a time is fine.

Sunday - Roast beef dinner with potatoes and carrots
Monday - Japanese style beef curry with rice, potatoes and carrots
Tuesday - Beef chili with rice
Wednesday - Spaghetti and chicken fingers (or as SwiftKey thinks, children fingers)
Thursday Fish sticks and rice

The plan worked mostly well - my husband had to work late on Wednesday and the chili never got made, so things moved around a little, but it was all good. Cooking a whole bag of creamer potatoes in the Crockpot on Sunday made the curry so easy the next. Hubs was also not keen on the beef curry and I ended up eating most of it for lunch. I thought we had a proper brick of curry in the cupboard, but it turned out to be a bachelor chow kind of deal that you microwave and squeeze over rice. It wasn't hot or spicy enough for my other half.

Still, there was plenty of food to be satisfied with and beef left over for the freezer. I don't know what this week is going to hold, but it probably won't be so beefy :)

YA novel from the 80s (I think)

Book I want to read

Originally posted by kayelledub at YA novel from the 80s (I think)

I'm looking for a book I read as a child in the 90s, but that I think was published in the 80s. It had a castle and a unicorn on the cover. I don't remember much of the synopsis but I know it was about siblings who had to go stay with their aunt and cousins (whom they did not like) for a summer and who found a portal into another world thru a shrub in the yard. The other world had unicorns and knights and the kids had to go on a quest.