quin-overload

i am back to cooking! cooking and writing. this won't last long.

my project tonight was a little quinoa salad from bon appetit. it's f-ing hot here, and i couldn't bear to eat anything warm. also, we tend to fall into a pasta rut so i wanted to try a new grain with some extra protein. cold quinoa, corn on the cob, and perhaps a cold steel rail sounds nice, doesn't it?

it promises to be delicious... i love the combination of mint and feta. but be warned, it makes a lot of salad. a lot.

here i started, innocently enough. a nice bowl full of vegetables and chickpeas, mint leaves patiently waiting...



... while the quinoa cooks.

all was well until i realized that i had yet to add the four cups of spinach leaves. holy hell. no way i was going to fit 6 more cups of food into that tiny red bowl. this forced an upgrade (downgrade?) to the none-too-fancy yellow tupperware usually reserved for vats of potato salad at cookouts. but i snuck a little bite and it sure is tasty! i did substitute regular old red wine vinegar for sherry wine vinegar and regular old paprika for smoked paprika. the shrewsbury shaw's only has so much to offer.



perhaps if you're making it for less than a party, you'd like to halve the recipe. i fear we will be eating this for days.

and, for my horsey friends, this is sarah. she refuses to stand still for photos (too busy trying to figure out how to eat the crossties while she is on them), so most are a blur, but she says hi! isn't she pretty?

sustainability.

for once, i'm not talking about the planet.*

my life is unsustainable. look at this poor blog, so neglected, such a wasteland of communication for the last two months. it seems like i'm doing a bad job at everything - taking care of my patients, keeping in touch with my friends, getting to the barn, changing my oil, and cleaning the house. oh, cleaning the house.

the thing is, i like clean houses and sometimes i like cleaning. however, i do not like it more than, say, sleeping. more than anything, i hate laundry. i hate lugging it down the stairs, i hate having to have cash to put on my laundry card (no $1 bills, $20 is a risk because what if you then lose the card, LIKE I JUST DID), i hate needing two hours of uninterrupted time to get it done with out some lunatic huffing at me because i was ten minutes late getting to the dryer. i hate. it. all.

this is why i have moths.

a long time ago, when i lived in williamstown (nostalgic sigh), the laundromat had a pickup and dropoff service for laundry. some day, i thought. some day. of course, when i was 23, i also imagined my late 20's as a time of relative wealth and glamour, possibly with a husband and child. HAH.

so anyway, why am i rambling like this? well, sometimes when i drive down towards the target, i drive past a laundromat here that has a "wash, dry, and fold" service for 75 cents per pound. i don't know how much a pound of clothing is, honestly, despite trying to gauge it by hefting my hamper around, but at this rate i spend $3.50 to wash and dry a load here, so if that load weighs about 5 pounds, i'd come out even.

so f*ck it, i'm having someone else do my laundry.
and with that, i venture out with my first hamper of clothes.

*talk to my poor boyfriend, though, who got the silent treatment for half of game 7 the other night for continuing to bring me bottled water even though the tap water is perfectly good. sorry, that was crazy of me.