return of the weekend cooking fest

This was supposed to be our first weekend home together since about June. So of course my boss called me at about 3:00 on Friday afternoon and asked if I would come in Saturday morning to meet a bigwig who was coming to see the museum with his wife and kids. So of course I had to go in. I was only there for a few hours, which wasn't too bad, and my job ended up being to entertain their twin 3 year old boys. They weren't too sure of me at first, but after showing them an alligator and letting them play a drum, we were old friends. I went in at one point to get everyone bottles of water and the boys followed me, even though my boss tried to lure them away. I didn't get invited to lunch with them, but I got a three year old high five at least. Not bad.

We made sure to get up early enough to go to the farmers market and stock up for the week. After I got home from work, we came up with meals for the week, made a shopping list, then started moving furniture. Obviously. I think it was sometime around then that Alfred got a text from Billy's wife asking if we would house sit all this coming week. It's been awhile since we house sat for them, but it's pretty standard for them to ask us about 24 hours in advance of when they need us. So I guess this was more notice than usual, actually! However, it meant that our week's worth of meals was going to have to be prepared this weekend. So that's what we did today.

We started this morning off by shopping, then got to work cooking. We had a whole mess of vegetables and defrosted meat to use and needed to be as efficient as possible in our recipes. So we ended up making an arm roast in the slow cooker, an oxtail stew and roasted red pepper soup on the stove, and cucumber salad. We just ate the soup for dinner (pretty good), wrapped up the cucumber salad, and are still cooking the other two. Hm, it felt like a lot more work when we were actually doing it. Unfortunately we sort of forgot about taking pictures, so this one is from our first dinner of our trip, in Mobile. Also, we discovered at some point of the day that we somehow get Bravo, so I recorded a couple episodes of Top Chef, which we're watching now. What a foodie weekend!