To piggy-back off of my last post, following recipes is hard! A lot of the things I’ve been making lately have been inspired by my new favorite book, The Home Cook by Alex Guarnashcelli, including this one. Greg found this recipe while browsing through the book so we grabbed some cream at the local Lidl and put it on the list of things to try out this week! The original recipe was actually even simpler than what I ended up doing but after one crucial addition, I don’t think I’ll be able to make it any other way!
My wreck of a kitchen while cooking. You’re welcome.
Leftover Worth Garlic Cream Sauce
25 cloves of garlic (averaging medium size)
2 cups of heavy cream
2 cups of milk
salt
1 tsp ground black pepper
1 package of bacon
Worcestershire sauce (to taste)
Blanch the garlic. This is the most crucial tip that I learned from The Home Cook. Bring water to a boil in a medium saucepan. Once it has reached a boil, add about 2 tsp of salt, add the garlic for one minute, then drain the garlic. Refill the saucepan with new water and repeat this process two more times leaving the garlic in for two minutes each of these following times.
Add garlic, cream, milk, salt (to taste), and pepper back into saucepan and let simmer for about 15-20 minutes. Every once in a while, test the cloves of garlic to see how soft they’ve become. Once mine got soft, I used my hand blender in the saucepan until the sauce was smooth. For me, it was still pretty runny so I left it on the heat until it reached a bit of a thicker consistency.
While the main ingredients are simmering, get to work on that bacon! This was my favorite and most brilliant decision in the modification of this recipe. I kept the bacon in the pan until it was chewy then scooped it out, poured the grease into the sauce (YUM), and cooked the bacon in the microwave until it was crispy and easy to cut into small bits with a knife.
After the sauce has reached your desired consistency, get those bacon bits in there, give it a stir, and serve! We served ours with linguini noodles and it was the bomb, and great leftover for lunch today!
As much as it pains me to say, my meal planning has taken a hard hit since moving to Ireland. Between being busy with all of the stuff that comes with moving and the significant difference in groceries, it’s been hard!
Some of the most basic ingredients have been difficult or impossible to find. We have about a thirty minute walk to the nearest chocolate chips, spend a fortune on two jalapeños, and weirdly enough have yet to find thyme. Pantry ingredients are really limited and even shopping for produce is different. Every time I try to pick out recipes ahead of time, we end up getting to the store, trying to find the asked for ingredients, looking instead for the most similar ingredients, and then just end up modifying the recipe or deciding to make something else entirely. I’m hoping that I get to know the shopping better and can get back to meal planning but it’s put a huge damper on my meal planning.
I have nothing to blame my lack of pictures on other than a dirty kitchen and scattered brain.
Cookie Day
With everything that’s been going on lately, I feel like I am missing time with Foster and want extra sweets to stress eat! I mean, the baby wants the sweets…
I found a perfect solution: cookie day. Once a week, Foster and I pick a cookie recipe and bake cookies together. It’s something fun for us to do together and the output is usually pretty, darn, good. My favorite is seeing Foster learn more about how to measure and what standard ingredients typically go into cookies. Keep an eye out for some of our favorite recipes and hopefully some pictures!
sweat.
Again, life has gotten a little in the way. After hearing the bad news about baby Lucky (read on for more), I was hesitant to put too much stress on my body. I kept myself limited to walking but didn’t do much else.
This morning, I started easing myself back in (two weeks off while pregnant is a doozy!) with a low impact dancing workout from the Beachbody series called ‘Country Heat.’ It felt amazing to get moving again and while it didn’t feel like much at the time, I’m going to wait and see how I feel tomorrow before deciding if I should add to the suggested workout for the day in the series. I’d love to get back to strength training as I’ve gone a little soft and have to get to prepping this body for labor!
parent.
foster
Foster has recently started preschool and has been loving it! He cries whenever I go to pick him up. It was cute the first time but now it’s old. There’s a nationwide program here that allows for children to go to preschool for one year for free and it’s been an absolute lifesaver for us.
The main excitement in Foster’s life was that sometime during the night before Halloween, he fell out of bed, hit his head on the fireplace, and crawled back into bed to fall asleep! He came out of his room on Halloween morning with his skull showing and his head (and floor) covered in dried blood. I’m not sure how we made it four years without any emergency room visits but it was quite exciting to have our first one be in Ireland! The first hospital we went to didn’t accept kids under the age of 14 so we had to call a new cab, drive back to the other side of Dublin, and go to the specific children’s hospital that was actually closer to our house than the one the letting agent suggested to us.
He did not cry or complain once through this entire process. Holding a cold washcloth to his head wasn’t his favorite but he did like getting to be in a car in his jammies. By the time he was seen, the doctor decided to ask him a couple of questions to see if there was any brain damage and Greg and I were specifically asked to stay quiet and not help him with anything.
Doc: “I see you have a brother, do you also have a sister?”
Fos: “I don’t know!”
Doc: “Ok, and do you go to school?”
Fos: “Yes, I do!”
Doc: “Great! What’s your teacher’s name?”
Fos: “Ummm…it’s an adult.”
I thought we were doomed. Greg and I understood his answers, he knows he is getting another baby but that we don’t know if it’s a brother or sister and he had been in school for less than a week but I’m sure these weren’t the answers the doctor was looking for! For better or for worse, she decided his answers overall were sufficient and there was no brain damage. She glued his head back together, gave each of the boys a new teddy bear, and sent us home with instructions of “no boisterous play.”
graham
This kid.
He is an absolute goober and either loves or hates his mornings without Foster. We either end up having wonderful little dance parties and get to build towers that can be knocked over or he sits in my laps and points to his stroller just waiting to leave to go get Foster again.
Overall not much new with him, he’s a wrecking ball that gets into everything and I just can’t keep up.
lucky
Two weeks ago at our first scan in Ireland, we were told that Lucky had a bilateral pleural effusion-fluid in the cavities around both of their lungs. The two big things that we needed to look out for were chromosomal abnormalities and the development of hydrops fetalis, neither have good outcomes. Luckily, the chromosomal testing came back about a week later as negative which meant we were waiting to monitor for the development of hydrops. The fact that the effusion was the only thing wrong was something in our favor but the fact that it had progressed to both sides of the chest was not positive.
The effusions circled in red.
The outcome for chromosomal abnormalities ranges all over the board and hydrops has a 60-90% mortality rate but all that we could do was wait to see how the fluid levels progressed after two weeks, anxious and hoping that hydrops would not develop.
It was an incredibly agonizing two weeks of not having many answers and not wanting to share and worry our friends and family before we ourselves knew a lot. We had prepared ourselves for an early delivery (as early as 26 weeks if hydrops developed), extensive NICU time, possible surgeries before and after birth, and even thought about the worst.
We were on the brink of crying out of sheer joy at our follow up scan as the maternal fetal medicine specialist squirted that cold jelly onto my belly, searched around, and found that there was essentially NO fluid in either pleural cavity! I’m not sure we can stress what a relief, and shock, this was. It was the outcome you dare not even hope for. Our idea of a positive scan would have been the fluid levels staying the same and no other symptoms developing. Draining fluid we could handle, possibly losing our baby we could not.
Now, instead of constant monitoring and being considered high-risk, we go back in four weeks to verify that the fluid has resolved itself completely but we should be in the clear! Spontaneous resolution for this is not a common outcome and ‘Lucky’ could not seem like a more fitting name for our little one right now.
Looking down at 21 weeks and 2 days
I can’t begin to encompass the emotions I felt over those two weeks. Guilt, fear, shame, anger. Were we going to have to tell Foster that his baby died? Should I even be looking at double strollers? Staying neutral was hard enough let alone being happy or excited about little Lucky in my belly. I am so thankful for Lucky giving me a swift kick every once in a while to let me know everything was still at least ok and nothing had happened yet.
This is one family that will not be taking health for granted after just two weeks of stress.
Seriously, adding another little boy to the family has been such an incredible and overwhelming adjustment. One of the biggest ways we have had to adjust? Making our existing time and budget go just that little bit further.
When you cook, cook a lot.
Costco, Sam’s Club, bulk anything is your best friend. If you can buy and cook more at one time you go from having to cook for every single meal to making a batch of [x] and use it throughout the week. Part of why this works so well for us is definitely the fact that we are home for lunch every day. Having shredded chicken on hand to throw into a taco or on top of a salad later in the week saves us time and we were able to buy the chicken in bulk at the beginning of the week!
Need a tasty, healthy dinner on the run? Use some of the shredded chicken you made earlier in the week, toss it with some avocado, bacon, and lime juice and you have a quick chicken salad!
Keep cheap, versatile ingredients on hand.
This is another case where CostCo is your friend. Buy eggs, tortillas, salad greens, bread, whatever suits your fancy and then get creative with your leftovers! Remember that four pounds of top round steak you grilled on Monday? Eat it alone with rice and a veggie, put it in a wrap, scramble it with eggs into a hash (picture below, it was BOMB), toss it on a salad, make a pasta; you’ve got an easy meal and most of the prep has already been done.
Meal Plan
Sit down and plan what you are going to eat that week and then you make one trip to the grocery store. We might make a second trip out sometime to get fresh produce but really, we are done outside of that one time per week.
Seriously y’all, it’s so easy to keep your time and budget in check when you have a plan!
Quick post but I should be posting more goodies soon!
Want to keep up with my daily life? Check me out on Instagram @climbing_devil
We, as a family, are not dietarily restricted in any way. I’m a somewhat picky eater and we have a toddler but technically there are no restrictions to what we can eat. What we DO like to do is bounce around between different types of ‘diets.’ This allows us to eat healthy without really limiting what we can or cannot eat.
So this recipe for stuffed peppers falls into the category of paleo. The idea of a paleo diet is to follow a menu of what our bodies are evolutionarily designed to eat. Think pre-mass-agriculture. Think running down a bison and picking up a few veggies you find on the side of the trail on the way back to your cave. Got it? Good. It really is just meant to cut out processed foods (baked goods, candy, packaged goods) from your diet. It’s great on occasion, but I like baked goods, candy, and the occasional packaged good.
The peppers and filling all loaded into the crock pot!
This recipe is pretty straight forward, the most difficult part will be using the cauliflower to create ‘rice.’ I used my food processor which made it really simple but chopping works great as well! Everything else is outlined pretty easily through the step by step instructions!
Enjoy!
What you need:
1 pound of ground hot sausage
5 assorted bell peppers
1/2 head of cauliflower (this is your faux-rice)
1 small (8 ounce) can of tomato paste.
1 small white onion, diced
2-3 cloves of garlic, minced
2 tsp. dried basil
2 tsp dried oregano.
2 tsp dried thyme.
How you make it:
Cut the tops off of your peppers and scoop out and discard the seeded middle, save the tops!
Put your cauliflower ‘rice’ into a large mixing bowl
Add the minced garlic, dried herbs, and onion to your cauliflower and mix by hand
Use a very hot skillet to lightly brown the sausage
Add your sausage and can of tomato paste to your bowl of seasoned cauliflower and mix by hand, make sure you have let the sausage cool before you stick your hands in there!
Fit as much of your sausage mixture into your peppers as you can
Place the peppers into the slow cooker and loosely place the pepper tops back on (If you have extra meat and cauliflower mixture, just jam in between your peppers and let it cook)
eat sweat parent 