Weekend

This was the first weekend I didn't spend Sunday cooking. Craziness! But I had plans to go out to dinner Saturday night (read: leftovers) and went a couple meals over with my previous batch-cooking days, so that coupled with a histology exam left me with Sunday free (of cooking that is).

Both Saturday and Sunday had some good hikes.

 After hiking, Sunday looked like this:

Sunday night dinner was some vegetable leftovers, plus Italian elk sausage and butternut squash with Indian dessert-flavored ghee. Would I recommend Indian butternut squash and carrots, mustard greens with coconut aminos, and Italian sausage?  It actually wasn't too weird...

I had this for breakfast again Monday morning.

I did my batch cooking Monday night. Hopefully it will be done before I go to bed. I'm in the process of clearing out my freezer in preparation for a half hog so this was...

• Only half of the biggest cabbage I have ever seen
• Parsnips
• Celeriac
• Apples
• Onions
• Pork belly
• Bacon ends
• Pork breakfast sausage meatballs
• Tarragon, caraway seeds, salt
• Apple cider (because I wanted to save my broth for drinking plain, what with all the illness going around our class, plus I didn't think Merlot would work well)

A weird combination of things, but hopefully it will work out. 

Because I made it so late, dinner was restaurant leftovers. We ate at a restaurant in the Foxwoods casino  in Connecticut. It doesn't sound like a place for real food, but it was surprisingly easy.  The server was great about avoiding gluten and the beef in the menu was broken down into corn-fed, grass-fed, and Wagyu (although the grass-fed meat was from Australia...).  They called themselves a seasonal restaurant though, so maybe the vegetables were relatively local.  Regardless, I had my grass-fed steak with a side of Hen of the Woods mushrooms (eaten Saturday night), spicy ham (aka questionable spices) and Brussels sprouts, and cauliflower and garlic (whole cloves!).  It was the kind of place where the menu was broken down into starters, meats, and sides, so I just had sides for starters, then meat and more vegetable sides.  Sure, I felt a little sicker than usual after, but it could've been a lot worse.

So this week will continue to test my stress management abilities and good sleep hygiene, but at least learning about lipids is invigorating. I appreciate my professor telling us that brains love ketone bodies and that "without cholesterol, there would be no life," though he reminded us of the dark side of too much dietary cholesterol. Ha. If I could, I'd go down five egg yolks right now...