I’ve been pondering this post from Gretchen Rubin about her “patron saints.” In it, she says that people often ask her what the one key to happiness is, and she explains that she really thinks it comes down to knowing yourself. She shares some questions that can help you on that journey:

• Whom do I envy?
• What do I lie about?
• What did I do for fun when I was 10 years old?
• What do I actually DO? and,
• Who are your patron saints?

Those are great questions, and I might blog about them individually some time as food for thought. I’ve always really valued being self-aware but I feel like it gets harder the older I get! I can easily tell you what I did for fun when I was 10 years old, though: I read. And I swam. I listened to Y101.7 on the radio and tried to catch my favorite songs to record on cassette tape. And I played a made-up sport on my backyard monkey bars with my dad as the Olympic judge. So I’m not all too sure what that says about me.

But I’ve been pondering on the patron saint business the most. I love this concept, and I want to have a patron saint! Gretchen lists hers in the post, and they’re definitely not who mine would be. I haven’t totally pinned down a list, but the first that pop into mind might include Ruth Reichl, June Carter Cash as played by Reese Witherspoon in Walk the Line, Anne Lamott, and, I have to admit, maybe Gretchen Rubin herself.

Who would your patron saints be? 

I’m a sucker for a new recipe. In fact, I hardly ever make the same recipe twice. I sit down with Pinterest, my coupons, and the weekly Kroger deals on Southern Savers every Saturday and make a meal plan and a shopping list. I usually start from ingredients that I know I have on hand, like ground turkey or chicken drumsticks, and choose a recipe I’ve pinned. I open that in a new tab so I have the ingredient list, and I add the things I don’t have to my shopping list. Then I search for a coupon, or, better yet, find a version that is on sale. All that to say that I really do use my Pinterest, and when I see a recipe or genre of recipes making the rounds, I’m inevitably going to end up trying it.

Enter the crockpot lasagna. I’ve seen this floating around the Pinterest world and the blogosphere, and I’ve been a skeptic. How could lasagna noodles POSSIBLY turn out well in a crockpot? I kept remembering the Great Slowcooker Enchilada Debacle of 2013. But as I tend to do with trends, the day came that I all of sudden simply HAD to try out a crockpot lasagna. You know, “the day came when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom” and all that. (Just kidding with that quote. It’s a great quote, but I think it goes a little deeper than crockpot lasagna. Sorry for the diversion. Now back to our regularly scheduled recipe!)

Lasagna to me is special food. My dad makes the all-time best lasagna ever. (I know one of his secrets is that he NEVER skimps on the cheese.) I rarely make it because I feel like it is time consuming and labor intensive, and plus it’s not usually as good as my dad’s. But I enjoy eating it, for sure. So I thought maybe this crockpot business would make it a little more accessible, and since I had such low expectations, how bad could it be? I went with a veggie version that sounded interesting.

I set the ‘pot up to go on a Saturday morning, embracing my newfound love for weekend crockpotting.

I had to break the noodles a lot to make them fit into the pot at all, and I didn’t have quite as much sauce I would have hoped for. But alas! I set it to go.

Interestingly, this recipe calls for you to cook it on “warm,” or your crockpot’s lowest setting. I’ve often felt like the “low” setting on mine is not actually all that low, so it sounded good to me! You let it go for 6 hours and then crank it up to high for the last 2. This is what really got the cheese nice and melty there at the end.

Here’s how the lasagna looked at the end after I had served some:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Layers of goodness: check!

Melty cheese: check!

Cooked noodles: check!

It looks like a lasagna, and quacks like a lasagna, so I decided I’ll call it a lasagna!

For some weird reason, the top and bottom layers look like bacon. They’re not.

I will say, the noodles were a tad on the soggy side. I probably could have stopped it maybe an hour before I did and they would have been fine. But other than that, I really couldn’t complain! I don’t know that this was necessarily that much easier than a regular lasagna, though I suppose not needing to boil the noodles is a plus. But you still have to prep the stuff for the layers and then create the layers, albeit in a crockpot and not in a baking pan. However, being able to leave it unattended for a long stretch is nice, as is not heating up the oven (and as a result your entire 834 square foot apartment). So the verdict: never as good as my dad’s, but a passable substitute! I’d try it again.

What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever cooked in your crockpot?

 

One of my friends sent me a text recently saying she was thinking of me, and we got into a conversation about what we were doing this summer. I reminded her that for me, now that I’m not in school and since I don’t have children who are out on break, summer is not necessarily all that different from the rest of the year, at least schedule-wise. She asked if that made me sad, and I said no, which is true. It was a little strange the first summer out of college, but I’ve gotten used to it. But for whatever reason, even though nothing tangible changes for me, the summer still feels a little different.

It’s about 90% more humid, for one thing.

Just kidding.

I think it has to do with the pace of life, and my expectations of things. It seems like every week someone else is out of the office on vacation. I also simultaneously want to be outside all the time and never, if that makes any sense. I feel more inclined to make fun plans, and take little trips, even though I could take vacation from work just as easily any other time of the year. The longer days make me feel a little lazier, a little less pressured to get things done immediately when I get home from work. I love being able to walk to more things I do in the evening without having to worry that I’ll be trudging home alone in the dark.

And so when I read a recent post from Laura Vanderkam outlining her summer happiness list, it resonated with me.

In no particular order, here are the things that are making me happy right now:

• Going to the pool: in the summer, my idol on the weekends is taking a book or magazine down to the pool and lounging. I actually do this FAR less often than I talk about doing this, but it is my Golden Calf of what a summer weekend should be.
• And on that note, beach reads. I have absolutely no shame. I love them, even if I'm reading them on my couch instead of on the sand. And for some reason I feel more freedom to indulge in them when the sun is blazing.
• Bright polish on my toes and my leather Chaco flip flops.
• Seasonal beers (New Belgium Rolle Bolle!) and fruity cocktails
• Tan lines. I know, I know, too much sun is bad for you. I wear sunscreen, I promise. But I still just can't help feeling a little bit prettier when I've got a little golden glow going on. Which leads us back to number one on the list...

What’s making you happy this summer?

Recently I bought some hot dog buns to eat with a pack of smoked sausages I cooked one night. But there were only four sausages, and obviously eight hot dog buns. I was feeling particularly stubborn that week and didn’t want them to languish in the freezer until I finally decided to throw them away (as usually happens with extra hot dog buns), so I decided to buy some hot dogs. I’ve been trying to buy the more “natural” version of some things lately and so sprung for the more expensive Applegate Farms hot dogs (for which I at least had a coupon). I made chili one night and sent us each with 2 chili dogs for lunch the next day, thus using up the hot dog buns…but leaving me with two hot dogs. And thus a phrase was born: the frugal fallacy.

For those not up on their logic terms, a fallacy is a mistaken belief, especially one based on an unsound argument, or a failure in reasoning that renders an argument invalid. I think my frugal failure was the second. I wanted not to waste food, so I bought more food to use the first food up. And the second food cost more than the value of the remnants of the first food. Invalid.

Now, since we have to eat, it was definitely not a total waste to have bought the hot dogs. And, we enjoyed them! But I just thought it was mildly amusing when I realized that, by wanting to be frugal and use food up, I had spent more.

Another example I could see of a frugal fallacy would be buying something just because you have a coupon for it (which I’ll admit, I’ve sometimes been guilty of), or driving out of your way to get a deal (using extra time and gas in the process).

What do you think? Do you think the frugal fallacy is a real phenomenon? Have you been guilty of this particular lapse in logic?

Well guys, I have a confession: I never finished my Whole 30. In fact, I ended up “quitting” the day after I published my last post about it, the one updating you all on how it was going. Hah. I don’t want to make excuses about it: I simply decided to stop. And I stopped with a bang, by eating a cupcake at a co-worker’s birthday celebration. Here’s the thing: it wasn’t that I hated the food, it wasn’t that I was struggling with cravings or “withdrawal” symptoms. It’s just that I felt like ALL I was doing for the week I lasted was thinking about food, cooking food, and cleaning the kitchen. For real. Cooking 3 solid meals a day is HARD. (Coincidentally, I also started the project the very week I transitioned into working full time, so there was that aspect as well.) And this is coming from the girl who already meal plans, who already makes a grocery list every week and knows what’s for dinner every night. I can’t imagine trying to come to the Whole 30 without already being in the habit of doing those things. It felt like a losing battle trying to keep enough “acceptable” foods in the refrigerator and on our plates. I felt stressed and tired and worried about what I was eating. And since I wasn’t feeling any positive changes to make it seem “worth it,” I just decided it wasn’t. The end.

I still mean everything positive I said in my last post, but I think the ambivalence I expressed there just won out in the end. However, as we’ve switched back to our “normal” eating habits, I have been trying to stick with some of the principle of the Whole 30. I’ve been trying to do fewer carbs overall, and I’ve been making sure my breakfast is a little bigger and contains a little more protein. I’ve been buying the “good” version of some food products, like milk and eggs (and meat when I find a good price), and I’ve kept some of the Whole 30 recipes I discovered in the rotation.

Here are links to some of the keepers I found:

• Pan-roasted Pork Tenderloin with Mushrooms
• Kale-Strawberry-Avocado Salad with Lemon Poppyseed Dressing (The kale that comes pre-chopped and washed in a bag is actually really great for any salad!)
• Crockpot Chili
• Cilantro and Green Onion Pork Burgers
• Stir-fried Pork with Cabbage "Noodles" (I passed this along to several co-workers who admired it in my lunch, and they also gave it their stamp of approval.)
• Basic Spinach Quiche (I got to use my pretty green pie plate for this! I added some cooked, crumbled sausage. Jimmy Dean makes an "all natural" sausage that is pretty darn close to Whole 30-approved and is reasonably priced. I tried several different egg dishes for breakfasts and found that this one stuck the least to its baking vessel; the others were dishwashing nightmares.)

All of these are simple and delicious. So if you’re thinking about trying a Whole 30, I’d like to encourage you that at least the recipes themselves don’t have to be intimidating. I got to practice even more my concept of “if I’m not sure what an ingredient is or if it’s super-specific and expensive, I can skip it and the recipe probably won’t suffer that much!” Andy has also proclaimed a love of spaghetti squash, the darling of the paleo diet, and I found you can cook a sweet potato in the microwave. Easy peasy!

I’ve strayed a bit in the last few weeks, but I’m trying to do basically Whole 30 meals for dinners. I’ve also pretty much given up Diet Coke. I realized I didn’t miss it nearly as much as I thought it would. I’m down to basically just one cup of coffee a day–but boy do I sure enjoy my flavored creamer in it!!! I’m still mostly going from breakfast to lunch without a snack, but I’ve re-instituted my late afternoon snack sans guilt.

In conclusion, the Whole 30 just didn’t work out for me, and I’m okay with that. It was a worthwhile experiment and left me with only some positive outcomes.

Have you tried any diets or eating plans? What are some approaches to food that work well for you?