Wide Awake I'm Not Sleeping
The sleep thing WAS going a lot better. I woke up at 4:30am every other day this week and since I go to bed between 9pm and 10pm, that's decent enough sleep to keep me functional and not a danger to myself or others. This morning I woke up at 2:30am. Wide awake, brain grinding on overdrive. By 3:30am I wept quietly into my pillow. Enough already.

I came to work early. I'm going to get my stuff done and do some cleaning and organizing this afternoon since my brain is going to be mush. Then I'm going to leave early and relax this evening and sleep like a baby tonight. This is just a phase. Everything is just a phase.

On to part 2 of my new recipe procurement strategy.

The main challenge is to find things that we both like. Bob's favorite meal is meat with a huge side portion of meat and extra meat on the other side. I prefer to accessorize with meat and usually only with seafood and poultry. My favorite foods often involve legumes and greens which Bob will politely eat a portion of and then root around in the refrigerator to see if there is any meat. Fortunately he is very happy with seafood and poultry and I almost always have a package of Trader Joes sausages in the fridge that can be whipped up and served alongside the lentil chard soup.

The next issue is the ingredient list. I love rich fatty food as much as the next person and Bob even more than that but I don't think it's healthy for us to eat a trough of macaroni and cheese three nights a week. So any recipes that call for two cups of heavy cream or 3 pounds of cheese are rarely brought out. I also don't like frying even though I think browned things are delicious so any recipe with extensive frying is generally skipped over.

Also remember I had this digestive meltdown last year which if you're truly interested you can find here. Start around April 10th. Going back and finding that I see that last April I also made gumbo and had insomnia. At that time the two were related because the gumbo turned my digestive system into a rebel attack on me, the empire, and I couldn't sleep during any of the battle scenes. Since then the rebels have been conquered although there are minor uprisings if I eat more than a tiny serving of anything fatty and delicious like French fries or chips.

The other ingredient tidbit is I hate when a recipe has about 35 items, 25 of which you don't normally have on hand and especially those things where you have to buy a bottle of something that costs $16 and you only use 1 tablespoon.

This weekend I think I'm going to make tamales which is not a new thing. I think my next new thing is going to be paella and I need to buy smoked paprika and I need to start scouting out recipes.