Quinoa Returns

Today’s Hello Fresh meal included a quinoa side dish.

It was my first bite of quinoa since the surgery. It’s been almost 11 months. After having a plate full of it 3-4 times a week (at least), I have returned to the land of the quinoa…

…and it was delicious.

Hello Fresh

My portions are still teeny tiny gastric bypass sized, but this is the fanciest meal I’ve had, I think, in almost a year.

Hello Fresh arranged it and shipped it to us, and Jen cooked it. The tilapia is delicious.

Long Day

Today has been a long day. Not sure why, it’s just felt stressful.

Tomorrow is going to be rough too. Tomorrow is in the office and, as I mentioned in a post the other day, I want to do a lot of Disney+ TV watching before I head out. I want to have everything packed up and ready, including my lunch, tonight so that I can save time in the morning. I am such a nerd.

Food has been okay today. I had a little stuck stomach feeling while taking my pre-lunch time calcium citrate pills. It cleared after about 10 minutes, but it was uncomfortable. Breakfast and lunch themselves both went off without a hitch. After having three issue-free meals on Sunday, I had two bad experiences on Monday. Lunch was a smidge on the bad side so I just stopped eating before I was finished. I had already eaten all of the protein I had planned so it was okay. Dinner was bad, but it mostly came down to me overcooking the chicken. It was too tough to chew enough and I just got tired. Then I ate a few chunks of potato and I think the skins weren’t breaking down enough and got stuck. We’re having fish and some green veggies tonight. I am sure things will go better. If so, I could have another three good meals day. That would be nice.

I am hoping to mix a song or two tonight in between packing for work tomorrow sessions. I would like to be done with REM (Record Every Month) for March before I sleep tonight. We’ll see how it goes.

Speaking of dinner tonight, we’re giving Hello Fresh another try. We’ve used it a few times before and it’s always been a good experience. The hang up we have is planning meals, ordering the meals, putting the shipment into the fridge and freezer, and then when it comes time to cook we change our mind and do something else. We want to get away from that and stick to the schedule. If we can do that then Hello Fresh is a great option. It’s so much better than me cooking the same thing every night, or ordering out all the time. I foresee success. Just with the added caveat that I have to avoid sugar, so anything we order that has sugar in it, I will have to take a pass on. We can still cook it, and Jen can have it. I’ll just skip that item on the menu. Let’s keep this house a No Dumping Syndrome zone, shall we?

Okay. Time to finish off the work day. The only question I have for the universe is when does Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania come to Disney+? I am not happy about the existence of a Marvel movie that I haven’t seen.

Hello Stress

As mentioned in the previous post, as well as a couple from last week, we are trying Hello Fresh again. Are you familiar with it? Every week they send us recipes and all of the ingredients for a couple of meals. All we have to do is follow the instructions and boom, fancy dinner for two. It’s kind of like culinary paint by numbers.

Except it tends to be really stressful. We’ve tried it in the past, as well as their main competitor Blue Apron, and generally trying to get all of the prep for each step done in time would raise our blood pressure by about 10000%. This time we’re taking it easier. If step one is prep, step two is cook, and step three is “while that’s cooking, prep again” we just do the two prep steps first. It takes longer to finish, but it’s easier on the heart.

Mostly.

There is also the little issue with the smoke alarms. I think in the last six meals we’ve done, we’ve set off the smoke alarms in the house four times. Four. Times. It’s gotten to the point where I turn on the exhaust fan and open all of the windows before I do anything else. It didn’t help tonight though. Frying up the chicken cutlets in the pan on the stove sure enough set those bastard alarms off once again. At least we know they work, right?

Speaking of the frying pan, the oil the chicken fried in splashed all over the kitchen. I’ve mopped the floor three times in the last two hours. Hopefully we don’t slip and fall. I would feel like a right asshole if that happened.

Still, despite all of that… the dinners we’ve made have been really good. Jen was a little down on one, but the rest have gone over really well.

Here’s hoping the trend continues. I think Jen is happy to not be eating chicken breasts and quinoa every night. Whatever makes my love happy.