Month: February 2010

The weather has turned from sunny and beautiful back to rain, reminding us, once again, that we live in Seattle.  Oh well. We must embrace winter in all of it’s wet glory, and adapt the best that we can.  My version of adapting often involves food, specifically carbohydrates. That is why this post is not about the lemon curd I was supposed to make.  No, tonight we needed some comfort food, and it came in the form of spaghetti and meatballs.  I found a wonderful recipe over at The Pioneer Woman, and decided to give it a try since I had never made meatballs before.

The tricky part was browning the meatballs in the pan without having them break apart, thereby turning your meatballs into meatbits.  Since you brown them just a few at a time, the first ones were pretty much a fail, but they got progressively more ball-like as the process went on. I think it had something to do with the fact that I was rather liberal with the olive oil.  Now, AFTER I made dinner, I found out that I could have just browned them in the oven, but it was kind of fun to brown them in the pan.    After making the meatballs and setting them aside, the recipe calls for making the sauce right there in the same pot.  I like this.  Fewer dishes.

I broke into our MASSIVE bag o’ onions which I will defeat before they go bad, added them, some garlic and tomato products and eventually the meatballs.  Oh the yumminess.  Dinner was a huge hit.  This recipe will be made again, whenever we need some tasty, warm food to help chase the clouds away.

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Neither Tom nor I are all that big on Valentine’s Day.  We’d both rather treat each other well every day, than have to pick one day to show our love.  However, even with all of this self awareness, it’s virtually impossible not to be at least somewhat effected by the stupid holiday, and to be perfectly honest, I think I would be slightly disappointed if Tom forgot the holiday all together.  So in the past, we’ve usually “celebrated” by making a nice dinner at home, or occasionally Tom caves to societal pressure and I’ll discover beautiful roses on the kitchen table on my way to work.  This year, I told Tom that I didn’t want flowers, as they just die anyways, and that if he wanted to get me something, I’d like some sort of pretty house plant.  Now, around here “plant” is the magic word.  If you doubt this, head over to my dear husband’s blog.  The man loves plants.  I mean really LOVES them. To the point that I get jealous of them sometimes.  So he was slightly excited to get to pick out yet another plant for us.

::aside:: Last year around this time, we were in Maui.  This is painful to remember, as we are not currently in Hawaii, and that is a sad thing.  However, when we were in Hawaii, we were given a Giant Protea flower early in our jaunt around the island.  It was huge.  It became our mascot, went everywhere with us, and eventually came home with us, (how I was able to bring it through the department of agriculture screening is beyond me, but it was strapped to the outside of my backpack, so I wasn’t smuggling the thing or anything).

Fast forward to this year’s Valentine’s Day.  Tom came home from running some errands and was SO EXCITED  to show me something. It was this beautifully strange plant, which is apparently some type of protea so that we’ll always be reminded of the wonderful time we had in Hawaii together.  Awww.  The plant has weird tentacle like flowers and its leaves are waxy like a succulent.  It’s strange, and so are we.  It’s the perfect Valentine’s Day plant.