Leftovers... they never sounded so good!

Our week of eating only non-processed dinners is over - and it was a rousing success. We definitely found some dishes we want to make again, and we have leftovers to feed us most of this week (which, for the first time in human history, we're very excited to eat). Tuesday night was Mediterranean Couscous:

Words cannot describe how good this dish was... because it wasn't good. For as pretty as it looks, it was bland (at best) with a really bad aftertaste. It was surprising - because we like all of the ingredients separately, but together, it just didn't work. So if you want to know how a whole bowl of this tasted... ask our dogs - because we ate leftovers and gave the rest to them.

The rest of the week went spectacular - here's the visual:

Wednesday was a Vegetarian Shepherd's Pie (top left), a Tex-Mex Skillet (top right and bottom left), and Saturday was a Mexican Egg Skillet (bottom right) - Friday night was leftovers night. These three dishes may very well have been our favorites - and the last one was an impromptu recipe. We were supposed to have a Three-pepper stir fry - but neither of us felt like having it that night... so we used a few of the peppers from that recipe, leftover chorizo sausage from the Tex-Mex skillet, some eggs, and frozen potatoes to make this wondrous feat of a meal. Great, great stuff. It will definitely be made again.

But the best thing from the week? This:

A completely made from scratch Boston Creme Pie. I spent most of the day Tuesday making the cake, the custard filling, and the chocolate icing. Not a thing in this is processed, and everything in it is absolutely freakin' delicious. It's been our dessert almost every day this week. Now we just have to figure out what we're making next week :)

This definitely has us looking forward to future recipes to try (and making most of these recipes again). The plan from here on out is to have one or two "easy" dinners a week - mainly the processed stuff (like frozen pizzas) that we still have around from previous shopping trips and the occasional dining out, 3-4 dinners made from scratch, and 1-2 dinners of leftovers. Lunches will be a mixture of leftovers and stuff like lunch meat. We still need to figure out breakfasts (at the moment we have about 4 different kinds of Cheerios - better than most cereals, but still processed). The goal for us is to have 75-80% of our meals be unprocessed (we estimate we were eating 50-60% of our meals processed). And, despite the fact it will be more work, we're both really excited because the meals really do taste better - and it feels better to make them as well. Above everything else, we're really excited at the idea of starting a trend of giving better food to our kids over the years.

As far as the halving of the rest of our stuff goes, as we thought, it's been a slow week continuing going through the Corner from Hell. I've gone through a few of the boxes that ended up on the table, and actually gotten rid of about 95% of what I went through, but in the end going through those two boxes really hasn't done much considering there are about 15-16 boxes on/around that table. Where we did do some work is with everything that ended up on the fireplace. Here's the before and after:

We got rid of everything here with the exception of the poker chip set (the metal case in the center) and the train set (against the wall in the back). Everything else was either donated, thrown out, or given to people we know that wanted them. Hopefully soon we'll be able to say the same about the table!

Let's have dinner... and then go to Hell!

Tonight, we officially had our first food disagreement in our week of starting the halving of processed foods. One of the minor goals of this was to expand our cooking repertoire by coming up with some new dishes and even some new ingredients (which, on a side note, included a delicious Layered Enchilada Bake last night). Tonight's dish: Lemon Chicken Pasta Toss (that's right, it's not just an Italian sport anymore!):

The disagreement was nothing major, but we have found a new ingredient that I very much like, and Lauren incorrectly is not so much a fan of. The ingredient in question: capers. Neither of us had ever (knowingly) had them before tonight; delightful little fellows they are. But even the disagreement over capers couldn't detract from something very important about this dish - it's delicious. We just may have to make it from now on by taking half of it out before adding the capers - you know, until Lauren realizes she's wrong about them :)

After our dinner, we decided it was time to get back to business with this whole "getting rid of half our stuff" deal. And what better way to get back on top of this than to tackle (cue ominous music) The Corner from Hell!!!!!!!!!!! Here's what the corner previously looked like:

Scary, I know. I sincerely apologize if any of you had small children in the room when you viewed that picture, I hope they someday can get over the horror. But, after a few hours of work, we managed to make a dent in the corner. I'll walk you through this... you enter our dining room, look towards The Corner from Hell and all the horror contained within it, and instead, you see this:

"Amazing!", you think, "these are clearly the two most talented 'halvers' in the history of halving!". You see that the bottom shelves are still lined with old course packets from college classes from almost a decade ago, but the overall change is so drastic, you are willing to forgive that. You then decide to take a look in the neighboring closet (the closet Styx?), which had previously looked like this:

(There was more - so much more - but the horror... it was... too horrible) And now, you see this:

The left side... still horrible... but the right side - it's almost empty! You cannot even say enough about the work that has been done by these people - you are so impressed by them you want to pay them thousands of dollars just to clean your living room! And then... you turn around:

"OH NO!!!!!!!!", you exclaim, as all the good feelings you just had flee your body quicker than a sane person can change the radio station when a Miley Cyrus song comes on. "It's like someone has pulled the metaphorical stopper from the metaphorical wine bottle, and pure evil has escaped to take over the entire world!!". And then, someone taps you on the shoulder and says "I think you've been watching too much LOST". You calm down. You look that person straight in the face... and then poke them in the eyes (the groin of the face). "NO!!!!!", you scream, "one cannot watch too much LOST!!!!! I must watch more LOST!!!!!!". Then, out of nowhere, Lauren says "enough about LOST, Brett - this is arguably the most ridiculous blog post you've ever written, and half the people reading this won't even know what you are talking about. Now get back to writing about The Corner from Hell or I'm going to delete all this and do it for you". And thus you are saved.

So, here's what's going on. That corner and closet were filled with things from years gone by, things we just couldn't part with. In the boxes, bags, crates, and baskets that inhabited that area are things from my childhood like baseball cards, comic books, medals and trophies; stuff from my several hospital visits in my teenage years (while this was a terrible time in my life, it was a significant one that very much shaped who I am today); articles and course packets from classes we really enjoyed in college; and a variety of other stuff that we just haven't been able to get rid of over the years. But now, we're really going to go through this. We knew this corner (and closet) was going to be a big project - perhaps one that took course over a few days. And after really getting into this, we know it's definitely going to take a few days, if not a few weeks. This one is going to be especially tough for me, as it is going to be difficult to get rid of some things that while I can logically say "why do I still have this?" and I know they've been stuffed away in that closet for years, there are parts of me that have held on to these things for a reason. Discovering those reasons are going to be interesting, and are very much going to dictate what things stay and what (hopefully) many things go.

halving our processed food consumption?

So, we've watched a couple episodes of a new show, "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution", and we've been inspired to continue working on our eating habits, in particular reducing our consumption of processed food.  Lauren attempted to "give up" processed foods for Lent, which resulted in some reduction of processed food combined with the realization that depending on how you define "processed", this was easier said than done.  While Lauren did buy more organic and try to avoid eating out anywhere other than Chipotle and Panera, it was not the most successful Lenten sacrifice to date, that's for sure. 

Still, we are going to try to continue to reduce our processed food consumption, and to help, Brett decided he would give Lauren a week off from planning and preparing meals, and try cooking new recipes, so he found 7 recipes we've never tried before from several of our cookbooks, made the shopping list, and today we did a grocery shopping that we hope would have made Jamie Oliver proud.  Aside from the 3 varieties of Cheerios (they lower cholesterol!), the Nature Valley granola bars (processed, or not?), chicken broth and canned beans and tomatoes, we think everything else we bought would be considered fresh food!

We were quite proud of ourselves, and dinner tonight was delicious.  Cajun mustard pork chops, risotto and corn.  (OK, we've had risotto and corn before, but the entrees are all new to us).

And Lauren is not sure what she's more excited about, eating healthier or not having to cook for a week!  It is amazing how taking a good look at our stuff and trying to get rid of anything we don't need or love has also inspired us to look at other aspects of our lives and determine what is really important to us and worth putting effort into, and what can be eliminated, and we agree that processed food should go and fresh food is worth the effort.  Next we hope to tackle the Corner from Hell :)

We're not quite dead yet

We know, we know - it's been a little bit since we last updated on our progress. But don't worry, we're still alive (I feel happy! I think we'll go for a walk now). Last week was a rough one - we had company in this past weekend, and when we realized we had about 5 days until they arrived, we realized something very important: while spending all of March diligently going through and throwing things out, halving a bunch of things that were taking up way too much room, and organizing piles of God-knows-what, we failed to do one thing - clean. We had been steadily falling behind on laundry, we had not been keeping our tables clear of newly acquired junk, and it had been at least a month since we last dusted (yes... at least a month...). So, last week, that's what we did. We cleaned at least one room each day from Monday through Friday - fighting through dust, trash, a cold for each of us, and a general desire to not be cleaning. But, clean the house got, in a vicious battle that at this point we will call a draw:

And now, the house still remains relatively clean! So, we come upon a new goal - stay clean. This one has commonly and continually eluded us - but we really want to make it stick, as it will help with all of our other goals and make us happier over all.

On top of that, we're really starting to take a look at what we are eating. So far, we're only taking a look at it as we put it into our mouths - but we are growing less and less happy with what we are seeing. We've been talking for a while about buying and eating less processed foods, and we do great for about two days before we are like "what are we gonna have for dinner", decide cooking sounds like too much work, and one of us grabs some fast food on the way home. And really, I should give credit where it is due - Lauren's been the one leading this charge, I've pretty much let her do any planning we have done and then done my best to sabotage (not in a mean way, but in an apathetic way) what planning she has done. So, I'm challenging myself - this weekend, I'm going to plan the meals, and I'm gonna make sure they get cooked. We haven't quite figured out how we're going to quantify this - whether we choose to halve what we spend on processed food, attempt to guess how many "real" meals vs. processed meals we have been eating and halve the number of processed meals, or what - but we plan on making this a long-term goal as well. And you can be right there with us. Got a great (and easy, please!) recipe? Leave us a comment with it - we're open to suggestions. We'll eat just about anything, as long as it doesn't have mushrooms. Or onions. Or fish (other than salmon)...

Yep, we're easy to please ;)

Wow - that's a lot of wood

So, my weekend of many projects kind of happened. First and foremost, our previously un-faced cabinet now has a face and doors:

That was project #1. Took about 10 minutes (or 3.5 hours). At some point, I'll paint the new face/doors white along with all the existing cabinets, but until then, our kitchen will remain mismatched (we'll just claim it "adds character"). From there, we moved into the garage. Here's where things start to get "kind of" done. Turns out, it's a terrible idea to think one can get a whole lot of large projects done over a three day weekend when you forget that two of the three days contain your birthday and Easter. In other words, I (shockingly) over-committed myself. This, in the end, created way too much stress, and I ended up wasting what could have been wonderful family time being stressed and feeling overwhelmed. Luckily, I have an amazing and understanding wife, who put up with my super-annoying-ness - and things still got done.

As you may remember, the garage previously looked like the trash yard at your local lumber store. I knew there was a bunch of excess lumber in there, ranging from entire boards to halves of plywood sheets to bundles of 1/4-inch lath to two-foot-long sections of two-by-fours and one-by-fours. I quite possibly could have built a new garage out of the wood stored in our garage. In the end, I threw out 160 pieces of wood - that's right, 160 pieces of wood left over from various other projects. And you know what? I'm not even done. I've still got some more to clean up on the right side of the garage - and there's at least still another 300 pounds of sawdust on the floor as well. But lets not focus on what didn't happen - and instead celebrate what did. Here's what the garage looks like now:

I still need to deal with the sawdust - but I've cleaned off most of the items that were covered in sawdust, thrown out a ton of trash (along with the aforementioned wood), and organized a great deal of things. But most importantly, I turned over half of our kitchen counter-shelf into a shelf in the center of the above picture (making this space extra usable).

This adventure had a sentimental moment, as well. I'm sure you all remember the rogue stick found in the "Closet from Toledo" - well, I have found it's daddy (the rogue log) and it's cousins (the three vagrant bricks):

As with the rogue stick - I've never seen these items before. I have no idea why they were in our garage. And I can only guess that the rogue log mated with one of the 160 pieces of wood I tossed out to produce the rogue stick. I just only hope they will all be reunited some day.

So just how much crap did I throw out? Here's the visual:

The 50 gallon trash can on the right is full of some of the smaller pieces off wood, sawdust, soda cans, paper, and all the other crap I found on the ground. The middle one has most of the 160 pieces of wood that were thrown out. Leaning against the trash cans are the pieces of plywood gotten rid of, along with an almost empty bucket of joint compound and a bag of sand (a bag of sand? Come on!). The trash can on the left? Let's just say two kids in diapers poop a lot :)

And you know what's really rewarding? When you start seeing the fruits of your labors. After all the work we spent recently halving our books, it turns out we finally found a place to store our Ginny :)