Hi! Elizabeth here. I hope everyone stayed safe during the storm on Friday and Saturday! I planned on finishing this post on simple 20 minute meals on Friday during the nor’easter. Kept finding myself wondering if our power would hold out so I could finish this post. Well, our power never went out, BUT a neighbor’s tree fell on part of our house. It sounded and felt like an earthquake!
Thankfully, no one was hurt.
I’m grateful to our neighbor for finding a tree removal service that was able to come out Saturday afternoon.
Next step is to schedule the repairs. Since we’ll be coordinating those this week (hopefully!), I’ll definitely make these super simple 20 minute meals:
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Trader Joes’ Mandarin Chicken with rice and green beans
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Spaghetti and Meatballs with broccoli
Both these meals are so quick and easy, you might worry they don’t count as real meals. They both only take 20 minutes to make. As I mentioned in my last post, meals don’t have to be perfect to be “real.” As much as I love to cook, opening packages, jars, boxes, and heating up food and putting it on a plate counts as cooking. Just like with life it’s not black and white. Cooking also falls on a spectrum. There are times someone else cooks your food. Sometimes you cook frozen meals from a bag. Other times you have a sandwich and sometimes you make a 3 course meal. Well, you likely only do that if you like to cook and definitely not on a weeknight! …
It was New Year’s Eve 1996. My new boyfriend from Ohio was visiting me at home in Raleigh. We went to Duke, 30 minutes down the road, but being with my family in Raleigh was exposure to southern culture. On New Year’s Eve, my mother asked Dan, “What does your family have to eat on New Year’s Day?” With a shocked look on his face he replied, “Pork and Saurkraut, like the rest of the world!?” As he tells it now, (he stuck around and now I’m married to him) he didn’t know anyone who didn’t have pork and sauerkraut on New Year’s Day. It was such a shocking question to him. This interaction between my mother and Dan prompted a discussion about New Year’s Day food traditions and certainly black eyed peas and greens. As I understand it, the southern tradition is to have black eyed peas (often served in Hoppin’ John) and greens on New Year’s Day for good luck! The peas represent the coins and the greens the dollars that you will acquire over the next year….