BOXING DAY: On Tuesday, February 8, I worked a shift closing a King County Elections box in West Seattle.
KCE has dozens of badly drop boxes around the county, and each one of them has to be manually closed by elections staff at 8pm sharp on voting day.
Another KCE employee and I staffed the box at the Highpoint branch of Seattle Public Library. It was fun visiting with voters, many of whom walked up to the box with their cute dogs.
Fortunately, we didn't have any late voters show up after closing time. It's always a bummer when that happens.
PLEASING BEES: We're so happy to see that 'our' bees have wintered over (at least so far)!
They are out and about on sunny days above about 45 degrees F, working hard to try to find pollen. This one in the photo was working our rosemary bush, one of the few things blooming right now. We've been setting out bee feeders to supplement.
If they survive until spring, it will be the first time one of our colonies had made it over the whole winter. Fingers crossed!
PREPPERS: Recently I decided that is like to try planning our fingers a week in advance. Historically, my "plan" had been just kind of winging it every night.
By planning ahead, I figured we'd make less trips to the grocery store, eat more fresh produce, have less food waste, and maybe even save some money. That, and planning ahead meant mixing up the menu instead of eating the same ol' stuff all the time.
So, I made a list of seven entrees and seven vegetable-centric sides and went shopping.
One of the meals we made was tonkatsu okonomiyaki, a Japanese dinner.
For the main entree, tonkatsu, we took thin pork cutlets, did a flour and egg dredge and coated them in crushed pork rinds. They cooked up quickly and perfectly in the air fryer.
The Japanese cabbage pancakes were fried on the griddle.
Both were topped with Japanese mayo, Kewpie, and home made tonkatsu sauce, which was delicious!
This dinner is a new family favorite!
I liked how Annabelle wrote the items' names in hiragana on our white board.
Another night I made a super tasty pork stir fry.
Another thing we finally tried is a "sheet pan" dinner - a mean where everything is cooked on one big cookie sheet. In this case it was
Gochujang chicken with roasted winter vegetables.
It was amazing! Everything was cooked to perfection, and the flavor was on point.
Another culinary adventure was a baked pasta dish involving a block of feta and a bunch of cherry tomatoes.
The recipe went viral on TikTok after a food blogger from Finland posted it. Grocery stores in Finland couldn't keep feta on the shelves for awhile.
The
recipe worked! I used gluten free rice noodles and added a little Italian sausage. The whole family raved about this one!
We also tried a red curry Thai soup . I liked it, but was in the minority.
Everyone was a big fan of one side dish adventure - cheesy white bean tomato bake. Super simple - just minutes to make, and our home grown basil was a great topping touch. (I used the Instant Pot to cook Northern beans instead of using canned, but canned would have been just fine.)
Another story side was Brussels sprouts air fried in a basalmic reduction sauce, with a few squeezes of fresh lime. Yum! So suddenly this has turned into a food blog, ha ha.
