Cooking Up A Storm

It was warmer today, got all the way up to 39 degrees, and I felt the change when I went to the grocery for fruit. But mostly I stayed indoors and cooked. First I made a batch of Curried Chickpeas. They smell so good and they taste good too. Before that I remembered to cook up a batch of brown rice and I remembered that my green-handled scoop dispenses 1/3 cup so I don't have to use a measuring cup.

Once the chickpeas were simmered, portioned out, and in the freezer I carried up the slow cooker to make a new recipe--Crockpot Chicken Chili. This was an easy one and the only slow cooker recipe in this bout. The hardest part of the prep was chopping the onion, the rest was all open cans and dump. At the end I tonged out the three chicken breasts, shredded them with forks, and put the shreds back into the soup. I'm going to use this soup for suppers once my current Investment Cooking portions from the August bout are finished, just for a break.

The Zentangle of the day is another uncomplicated one. I had a hard time figuring out the leafy sprouts around the pinecone looking thing but I managed to get some ink on the paper and made up the vine over the top corner. The vine in the book was way too complicated for my day.

My final recipe of the day was One Pan Mexican Beef & Rice. It's a simple skillet dish made with minute rice and a few other easy to assemble ingredients. So that's three of eight recipes done today. I did better than I thought I would. I'm hoping to accomplish two tomorrow.

Once the cooking was done and the dishes (mostly) washed I came back here to tackle the day's word count. Once again I didn't have a clue where to begin but I jumped in and eventually hit my word goal for the day. Tomorrow is the last day of NaNoWriMo and I will hit fifty thousand words. Many of the words aren't worth the powder to blow them up but they're words, I wrote them, and I'm counting them.

I've gotten on a Gatorade Zero jag since my intestinal bug last week (looking to stay hydrated) but I think that it might be a bad idea. I realized today that my lower legs and ankles are swollen and I checked to see how much sodium is in Gatorade. A lot. Maybe I'd better scale back on the Gatorade. Watermelon chunks have mostly disappeared from the grocery so I'm now eating pineapple chunks. I know that I've bought a lot of fruit from Metro Market because I looked on the app today and bowls of fruit chunks were the first three items it offered me. So predictable. But I love eating it!

--Barbara