Monday Musings: 10.18.2010 Edition

So we were walking the dog, minding our own business, when Mr. Death-to-all-Vermin decided to get all freaked out.

He does hate squirrels – though I’m not sure if it’s because they can scamper around so easily and painlessly, or if they remind him of Hater Kitty, or if it’s just the principal of the thing.

Or, I don’t know, it may be their brazenness – I mean, it takes some real attitude to just stand there and try to stare down a hundred-pound slobbering beast, don’t you think?

Finally – finally! – I got around to picking up a new citrus squeezer.  The old one was fine – but it was old.  And busted.  We were using it one day, and the little pin that holds the top squeezy part to the bottom squeezy part just . . . broke.

And since we were mid-lemon, we made do with what we had handy – a small nail that was about the same size.  It worked quite nicely – so nicely, in fact, that we just sort of forgot about it.  Until the next time we needed to use it.

OK, this was funny.

We were watching Big Bang the other night, and, not to give anything away or anything, Sheldon went a little nuts brought home a cat.

Or a dozen.

Jarly did NOT approve.  He’s extremely anti-cats-on-TV.

Don’t forget this week is the Third Thursday of the month!  Please feel free to join us for this month’s Third Thursday event – just “borrow” a recipe (or any other technique) from someone else’s blog and tell us about it!

Complete details are here, and remember, the more the merrier!

I can’t believe how quickly apple and pumpkin seasons have come and gone!  Usually, we’re able to pick apples nearly into November, but this was the LAST weekend to pick apples – and the pumpkins are done already!

Fortunately, we did get about 20 pounds of Granny Smiths –  which actually sounds like a lot more than it is.

And there are plenty of windfalls to keep the cider presses going for a while yet.  I hope, anyway!

I finally gave in and got an electric popcorn popper.  We like popcorn just fine, though in recent years, I’ve found microwave popcorn to be too greasy and well, it kind of tastes like chemicals.  I did pick up a nifty Whirley-Popper a few years ago – and used it once.

But then I started stumbling across various popcorn recipes – caramel corn and herby cheesy corn, and, well, popcorn is good for us, darn it!

Only – how do you get the salt to stick without a bunch of melted butter?

And once again, it’s time for the weekly menu plan.  Believe it or not, we’re still digging out the freezer – it seems that we’ve spent the past couple of years doing more filling than emptying of the freezer – we can certainly look forward to some creative meal planning, I think!

Monday – We’ve both been kind of wanting a breakfast-for-dinner night for a while – and here we are, with a bunch of breakfast sausage in the freezer, and both eggs and potatoes on sale this week!  I think we’re going to make up some sort of layered thing – maybe a base of hash browns, topped with some browned sausage, a bit of shredded cheddar cheese, then eggs – and just bake until the eggs set.  And I think applesauce would be a nice complement to that carb-heavy dish, don’t you?

Tuesday – The weather is supposed to still be decent, and we’ve got some chicken breasts in the freezer that will be great to grill.  We’ve still got lettuce going strong, so we may as well enjoy fresh salad while we can!  Peeps wants rice to go with it, which is fine, unless I can think of something a little more interesting.

Wednesday – It’s swim class night, so we like to just have a soup all ready that Peeps can put in the crockpot when he gets home from work, then it’s hot and ready to go when we get home.   We’re trying this Chickpea and Swiss Chard soup, only we cooked the beans from dried, cut the chard from the garden, and used homemade chicken stock and our own oven-dried tomatoes.  Other than that, we followed the recipe exactly!

Thursday – Since it’s supposed to be pretty rainy Thursday, plus we’ve got the last vet’s appointment for Jarly’s drug study, we pulled some lamb chunks out of the freezer for stew – Peeps will be putting that together Monday sometime, and it’ll have ample time to sit and rest before serving.  Again, Peeps will put it in the slow cooker to warm up, and come dinner time, it will be ready to go.

Friday – Yay pizza night!  It’s so good to be able to just relax and not worry about dinner, isn’t it!

Be sure to click on over to The Organizing Junkie’s Monday Menu Plan post for loads and loads of other ideas.