Martha, I ain't.

I have a confession to make.  I started out really excited to plan our meals each week and make a menu and a shopping list and stick to it and honestly, it saved a lot of money this summer.  We are planning a wicked amazing ski trip out West in the spring and plan on trying tricking ourselves out in boots with the fur so we need to pinch pennies.

But cooking every night at home still means......cooking every night. 

At home. 

I know, it's getting deep over here.

So file this under, something else I need to work on, but I have to use every single part of our kitchen each night, to cook anything really.  And our kitchen starts to look like this.  And it makes me crazy.




I snapped this picture to keep it real.  But I have some thoughts after looking at it now.

-Yes, it is very sanitary to keep your wasp spray on your counter top where you prepare food.

-You should definitely keep your juicer, blender, popcorn maker, panini grill, electric kettle, and food processor out.  At the same time. Bonus points if your slow cooker is sitting on your kitchen island.

-I think I see some paper plates there and I had no idea we had paper plates to use and why we aren't using them. 

This kitchen gave me anxiety all morning.  I just wanted to go out to eat and have some dancing mice clean up while we were out.  Too bad my glass slippers are lost in the mess and our mice don't dance. 

We have some cherished friends that are renovating their house this summer.  I want them to eat with us every meal so I tried to make our menu a little more "omnivore friendly" this week.  I hardly ever cook meat in the house and tried really hard to make the vegetarian diet as attractive as possible.  That included buying some cheese this week. 

First up at casa de Hires......Stuffed Peppers.

I didn't have a specific recipe but I looked up a couple of different ones to see what they usually included.  I sauteed one chopped zucchini, 5 cloves of garlic, and half of a white onion in some coconut oil for about 5 minutes until they started to brown some.  Then I added one cup of brown lentils and one cup of brown rice with 1/3 cup of quinoa.  After everything had been stirred together I tossed in one big bag of spinach.  Instead of water for this to cook in, I added one can of tomato soup with 4 cups of water.  Broth would have been good but I didn't have any.  The whole pot took about 30 minutes to cook and it was really good as is.  My favorite pasta sauce is kind of expensive but worth it.  It uses cherry tomatoes instead of regular ones so it is kind of sweet.  I poured some into my baking pan, stuffed my peppers and put some Parmesan cheese on the inside too before topping with some mozzarella.  They took about 25 minutes to bake in an oven at 350 degrees.  I ate mine with some cauliflower, steamed green peppers and nutritional yeast "Parmesan"  but that for some reason didn't photograph that well. 

This is full of nutrition, with so many veggies and whole grains.

A rainy Monday night, with friends, and like always, drinking most of the wine.  If I was a news reporter, that would be my signature tag line.