The day started well. It was super cold out, so I decided to postpone my morning walk with the dogs in favor of making pumpkin pecan bread. I used a variation of my banana bread recipe and it turned out OK. It needed some cloves to really bring out that pumpkin flavor. The texture was good and the sweetness was fine (I added a banana and some applesauce to make it sweet). I may need to try again to get the flavor right, but first I'll need a trip to the spice store.
A word about spice. It really does get old and lose its flavor, or worse... get rancid. For some reason, cloves are the worst for me. If they aren't used within 6-9 months, they taste really horrible (at least to me). I wish cloves were sold in much smaller quantities. It is such a flavorful spice, a tiny pinch goes a really long way. I'm pretty sure that most folks use no more than two teaspoons in a year (that is being generous, since most recipes call for no more than 1/8 - 1/4 teaspoon). Perhaps I'm missing some amazingly delicious clove dishes, but I've just not heard of them, even in Moroccan dishes. Alright, I'm done with my spice rant.
So, for breakfast, I had a slightly underspiced slice of pumpkin bread. After breakfast, we took the dogs back over to Forest Park. There is trail head just minutes from Marty's house, where we are currently living. Strangely enough, about a third of a mile in, we crossed into the trail we've taken a couple of times when we've driven quite a bit further up the street to the Germantown Road trail head. Cool. This time we took the trail in the opposite direction and wandered over a few miles of the other side of that trail. It was fun. Buckley was the crazy pulling machine again and I spent most of my walk developing my upper body strength by trying to keep him somewhat in check. That was fun, too.
When we got home, we were absolutely starving and completely uninspired. My first thought was to make some vegan burgers, but we didn't have all the stuff to put on them (tomatoes, avocado, cucumbers, etc.). Since I was standing in front of the open freezer, I looked around to see what was there. I noticed that we had one each of 3 different kinds of veggie burgers (freekeh, masala, and brown rice), some vegetarian potstickers, some zucchini fritters, and some fish "nuggets". They all got pulled out and went into our lunch. It was random and weird and probably not all that healthy (since everything was heavily processed), but it was our lunch and we ate it.
Our post lunch activity was a bit of plumbing work. Marty's kitchen faucet was broken and needed to be replaced. She and Brian went to Home Depot yesterday and bought a nice brushed metal faucet to replace the old white/cream one. Now it matches her fridge and microwave. Brian pulled the old one out (with some minor assistance from me). He is so big (6'6") that he barely fit under the sink, especially since there was a garbage disposal in there already. I volunteered to be the under the sink person (yes, I was humming the song from "The Little Mermaid", you know... "under the sink, under the sink, darlink it's better, down where it's wetter, take it from mink") since I was a better fit. I had a blast. So now, there is a beautifully installed new faucet in Marty's kitchen. We celebrated with some peanut butter pretzels and a cup of peppermint tea.
By dinnertime, we were even less food inspired than we were at lunch, if that is possible. Brian found a can of Hormel's vegetarian chilli (I don't recommend it) in the cupboard and we ate that with some quinoa corn chips. The chips were great (thanks, Trader Joe's!) and made an otherwise inedible soup slightly edible. Did I mention that we were completely uninspired and didn't really care what we ate as long as we made our bellies stop rumbling? It was sad, but true.
That is it. I was so uninspired that I put writing my blog off until today. When I got up this morning to write it, Blogger was down, so I took the dogs out for a walk in the balmy 50 degree weather. By the time I got home, it was up. Now I'm done writing and think I may go find some chocolate banana bread.
Be happy and healthy!
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