What's New

This is going to be a rare post for me - no photos, no recipes - but I think in my usual posts I miss a bit of the general food-related banter I so enjoy in other blogs, and miss the opportunity to do some stream-of-conscious narrating (an exercise I've always enjoyed).

Right now I'm in a major period of transition. First, in August I moved to a new apartment and a new kitchen. You'll notice from my photographs that my dishes have changed, as have many of my kitchen utensils. I don't have a dishwasher, which has made me a bit lazier. I also started a job near a large chain grocery store, which means those modern temptations (mainly frozen pizza and chocolate bars) have crept into my diet, and I haven't been frequenting New Pi nearly as often. The new job and the new semester also mean less time to cook, and I've been buying less fresh vegetables which means that when I am inspired I don't have much to work with. As a consequence, a lot of my cooking experiments lately have been not from cookbook recipes but rather brought-on by the food blogging challenges I've become so fond of these past couple of months.

Well, a lot of that is (hopefully) changing. Things are settling down a bit at school, and the warm weather is coming to an end. That means hot food is much, much more appealing. I got my tea order for the season from Mighty Leaf, and I'm already in love with the Earl Grey and the new Ginger Twist. I think I missed the latest SHF deadline for the fig challenge, but I have a container of dried figs and I'm considering trying a fig jam that somehow incorporates brewed tea. I've been copying down recipes religiously for quite a while from some of my favourite blogs (at some point I hope to do a little link post about those) and I plan to start cooking them soon enough. The Farmer's Market has a lot more now, so I'm going to try to pick some fresh veggies up until the frost kicks in, and finally, I've gone back to Weight Watchers.

I haven't been eating healthfully at all over the summer, so you wouldn't know it from looking at me, but I did Weight Watchers sort of unofficially (didn't want to pay for the meetings) for six months and lost fifty pounds. I stopped counting points and gained some weight as a consequence, but now I'm going back. Besides the weight benefit, I'm hoping this will have a positive effect on my budget - eating less means that I can justify buying semi-expensive ingredients, and making somewhat fancy things. Granted, I'm going to have to knock off the home baked desserts a bit, but I hope to keep doing SHF and maybe some other challenges as well. I'm thinking of starting a vegetarian food blog challenge as well... just have to think of what to call it!