New flavors

We've gotten a little stuck in a routine of eating the same five or ten meals again and again and this week we're trying to break out of it and eat some new stuff.

On Sunday we pulled two cookbooks down from their dusty, unvisited home: Rachel Ray's Big Orange Book (I swear I have no idea where this came from) and International Family Favorites, which features unique local dishes from each continent and full color photos of each recipe ornately staged in a culturally appropriate setting. I think these two just happened to be at the top of the stack.

As a result, our menu looks a bit different this week. It includes:

Sunday: RR's "Popeye" Risotto was aptly named as it was bright green and extremely spinach-y, mostly in a good way though it was one of those dishes that was so thick your mouth gets exhausted trying to move it around and swallow it. But all in all a pretty good new flavor (that spinach-nutmeg combo is not something we do often around here).

Monday: 11 Bean Soup. Eating this soup for dinner Monday and then lunch on Tuesday had Eric talking about his butt so much I suggested we should use a code word in from of Emerson, now that he is starting to really understand words. So now the word "jiminy" refers to all thing poo, butt and fart related. Because we then took this way too far, we now call the bathroom the "jiminy closet."

Special treat on Monday: Pecan Pie. We are still working our way through the huge sack of pecans we got from a Texas billionaire via my friend Sarah because he misspelled her name and sent her two by mistake, and I have gotten over my 'no corn syrup' reflex, so we made some pie. Yum!

Tuesday: "That's Shallota Flavor" Spaghetti (yes, from the orange book). Tasty enough but eh, not so special.

Still to come:
Wednesday: Handmade Salmon Burgers on Kaiser Rolls.

Thursday: Homemade empanadas!! (from IFF). We are going to do mushroom and potato & corn. I think if I was a different person the chances of these coming out looking very pretty and consistently shaped would be high. Being me, I am expecting a third-grader-playdoh aesthetic.