Tag: Dinner

Coming to the Close

The work day is almost over. About 10 minutes from now there will be another Monday in the books. Also, I will be 50% of the way through my 40% in the office mandate for this week. That’s nice. It’s also probably confusing if you don’t know what I am talking about but I do know what I am talking about so it is not confusing to me which is why I wrote this epic run on sentence about it.

Here is a picture of a cat that I took this morning before I left for work. She was confused and upset because I made the bed and messed up her hiding/napping spot/plans. Sorry, cat.

What else can I write about before the work day ends? A Red Sox win tonight and a Yankees loss will move the Red Sox into first place in the AL East. Yes it is only the 11th game of the season, but after the last few years of baseball futility combined with the Bruins suck fest of late, I will take a first place moment with a smile on my face. The Yankees and Tigers are playing right now. In the bottom of the eighth inning in Detroit, the Tiggers are up 6-2. Thanks, Detroit.

What else… I haven’t worked on anything musical since the RPM Challenge wrapped up at the end of February. I am a failure at musical life. Just saying.

Okay, I got distracted by something at work and now the 10 minutes have passed and it’s quitting time. Wish me luck on my evening commute home. Jen picked up something nice for dinner tonight. We have dinner together whenever humanly possible and I always love it. I love her, I can’t help it. The heart wants what the heart wants and my heart wants silly little domestic time with the woman of my dreams. There’s nothing wrong with that at all. Civilization coming to a crashing, idiotic, tariffed end doesn’t change the way I feel.

Air Fryer: An Obsession

I cooked lunch for me and my wife today. I cooked it in an air fryer.

I am about to start cooking dinner for me and my wife. I am going to cook it in an air fryer. I just have to wait for the dishwasher to finish so my air fryer baskets will be clean, then I’ll start on dinner.

I think I might be a little obsessed with cooking in an air fryer. Is that even a thing?

The only thing left to do (apart for wait another five minutes for that pesky dishwasher) is to decide what music to listen to while I cook dinner in an air fryer. I’ve been listening to a ton of Tsunami lately. Also a pretty healthy dose of Throwing Muses. Maybe I should drift back toward prog. I’m thinking maybe some 80’s Rush… or maybe some 90’s King Crimson? I don’t know. Let’s just see where the world takes us, m’kay?

Mystery Meat

Those tacos I made for dinner looked like regular tacos. They were not. They were special.

The taco meat inside the taco? You thought it was ground beef. No, it was not ground beef.

It was bison.

Oh yeah, you read that right. I just made bison tacos for dinner.

Why yes, I am a bad ass (culinarily speaking).

Who Needs an Oven

Really, an air fryer, an induction thingie, and a toaster oven. Who needs the big kitchen oven?

Jen does. She’s roasting veggies in the oven and cooking quinoa on the stove while I cook chicken in the air fryer and instant mashed potatoes (heaven’s gift, indeed) on the induction thingie on the other side of the kitchen.

We are kind of a team in this house.

Priorities are Jerks

Is doing the right thing overrated? Are priorities jerks?

Wednesday night I got a little less than six hours of sleep. I was really tired through most of the day on Thursday. I wanted to go to bed early last night but I ended up going to bed late. Fail. Then at about 3:30am I woke up with stomach pain. I have been doing a really shitty job over the last few days of eating three square meals. Three nights in a row I’ve had protein bars for dinner. It caught up to me. I was dealing with hunger pain a lot yesterday. I just couldn’t keep my stomach topped off for very long. I ate something before bed but it wasn’t enough and I was hurting when I woke up in the middle of the night. I had a little protein bar and felt better but I couldn’t fall back to sleep. It was annoying.

The end result? Less than five hours of sleep, and that includes over sleeping by about an hour. That lead to another question. Do I do my normal morning exercise and skip playing some guitar before work, or do I skip some or all of my exercise and play guitar. Ugh. I did the right thing. I did my exercise. I did not play guitar. I punched in to work at 8:50 with plenty of time to spare before the start of my shift, but I did not get any 50/90 challenge work done. No music for me.

Bummer. Maybe I’ll be able to sneak some work in tonight. Also, maybe I’ll have actual dinner tonight instead of just protein supplements. Not that there is anything wrong with that. I just don’t want to have hunger pains today. Let’s do the right thing, m’kay?

Out to Dinner

We went out to dinner last night. I can’t remember the name of the place. The Phoenician in Haverhill, MA? I think that’s right.

It was really good. We had a nice meet up with one of Jen’s coworkers and her wife. It was really nice to be out and social. We don’t do that often anymore in this weird post-covid world. The food was delicious, the conversation was fun. It was really nice. We should do it more often. Maybe at The Border Cafe in Burlington, MA? Who knows.

I took a picture of a neighbor’s house from the parking lot because I liked the eaves and the chimney. I should take the camera out this weekend and do some wanderin’ and some shottin’. I say it every weekend. One of these days I’ll do it.

Stomach Fun

Two days from now will mark one year and 11 months since my Gastric Bypass Surgery. That 2nd anniversary is right around the corner.

Today I think back to one of the regular check ins I had with the surgeon. I told her that I was having some issues with pain. I would eat something, then a few hours would go by and I would start to get a bad stomach ache. Am I doing something wrong?

No, she said. It’s normal. You’re hungry.

Huh… hungry, eh? That’s it?

Yup, you’re hungry.

Sure enough, when I get that type of stomach pain I have something to eat and it goes away. That’s all well and good except… well… I don’t want to eat. I want to not be hungry. I want to have breakfast and then not have anything else to eat until lunch, then not have anything else to eat until dinner, then not have anything else to eat until a pre-bedtime snack. That’s not how it works though.

Today I started feeling it about 2.5 hours after breakfast. I started feeling it about 20 minutes before my lunch break. I started feeling it again two hours and 50 minutes after lunch. It was probably 45 minutes before dinner. I had to have a snack. It was a small snack and it made me feel better, but not completely better. Now I’m having dinner so that should hopefully fix things for the next few hours.

Like I said though, I don’t want to be tied to food like this. I don’t want to feel hungry. I just want to take advantage of the fact that my bypassed stomach pouch is a little tiny guy and doesn’t require a lot of food to fill it.

I am not complaining. Not even a little bit. I am fine with all of this. I just didn’t expect it and I wish I had another way around it. I don’t though and it’s okay.

Dinner tonight is salmon and it’s delicious. Given all of the grief I used to give my mother when she tried to give us fish for dinner, she would be shocked that I am loving a nice piece of fish tonight. Who even am I?

Soup

Tonight my dinner was the universally accepted dinner for people with a bad cold. Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup. It was lovely, though it did bring up a question for me.

I am less than two months away from the two year anniversary of my gastric bypass surgery. Things are going well. I haven’t had dumping syndrome once and I have lost over 200 pounds. Huzzah, babie. Life is good.

There are rules that those of us who have gone through the full gastric bypass have to follow. Two in particular. First, if you have something to drink you need to wait 15 minutes before you can have something to eat. Second, similarly, if you have something to eat you have to wait a whole hour before you have something to drink.

Easy peezy, lemon squeezy.

What about soup though? I had a great big bowl of soup tonight and it was delicious and it cleared my stuffy head a little. As I was lapping up the broth I had a moment where I questioned everything. I just ate the chicken and the noodles, should I wait an hour before I drink the broth? I had a spoonful of broth as my first taste of dinner, should I have waited 15 minutes before I ate the chicken and the noodles? Putting it simply, does soup count as a food or a drink? I was lead to believe that one meal could not count as both, so which is it? Should soup be off limits? I chose to count it as food but is that an incorrect choice?

One other, unrelated, rule that I have to follow in this post surgery world is no alcohol. Does that mean I cannot have a dose of NyQuil to help combat my cold symptoms and to help me sleep at night? I am pretty sure NyQuil lives on the no fly list for that reason. I was going to have some tonight but I have decided to error on the side of caution and skip it.

Oh, what a fascinating new world is this post surgery life. Fascinating indeed.

Sunday Blues

How’s your Sunday going? Relaxing? Nice weekend day off? I hope so.

I am finding motivation very hard to come by. I got up a little late, did my exercise, ate my breakfast, wrote my daily writing prompt post, recorded a bunch of songs worth of crappy vocals, made the bed, and…

Apart from making lunch for me and my wife (burgers in a frying pan and french fries in an air fryer) I haven’t been able to push myself to accomplish anything else. I am going to try and play some guitar right now. Maybe for an hour or so. I am going to make dinner later, another Dinnerly meal like last night only hopefully my wife will cook it with me. If she does, she does. If she doesn’t, that’s okay too. I just wish I had a little more pep in me step, so to speak. I slept okay last night. Not great. I woke up at 3:30am and couldn’t get back to sleep right away. Eventually I did, and then I overslept a little. Funny how that happens on the weekends. Tomorrow is a vacation day (not related to the presidents day holiday which post-trump I will no longer capitalize) and I am wondering if the oversleeping will happen again. Who knows. Who cares.

It’s been an hour since I ate anything which means (by gastric bypass rules) I can drink something now. I think I’ll top off my water bottle with some sugar free Crystal Light lemonade and trek down to the cellar to play some guitar. What do you think? Good plan?

Get to it, red head.

Success at Last

We have been using the online meal prep service Dinnerly for a couple of months now. The goal was for my wife and I to cook the meals they send us together, but sometimes one of us has to run with it without the other.

I have made steak dishes on my own three times. The first time the steak was massively undercooked. The second time was better but still undercooked and the side dish burned. I was starting to believe that I just sucked at Dinnerly.

Tonight was my third try and it finally came out okay. The steak was good and the side dish, French fries from scratch, was really good.

I’m glad I no longer suck at Dinnerly. Insert the sound of my sigh of relief here.