Ah, the beauty of a napping baby.

Another tough night last night.  More teething.

But she's finally taking a decent nap this afternoon - going on two hours.  Long enough for Will and I to straighten up the house, both get in a decent workout and have a snack together.  (Have I mentioned how much I love having a fitness center - and a decent fitness center at that (most apartment complexes have a broken treadmill and some crummy free weights) - just six floors down?

::smiles::

Anywho, this meat CSA is awesome.  Like, beyond awesome.  We had some amazing sweet Italian sausage for breakfast this morning, and we'll have some leftover chicken from the dinner I made last night - Chicken Vindaloo.  We have about eleventy million ethnic grocery stores near our new home, and I'm enjoying being the tall white woman wandering around them, looking bewildered.  But I figure if real Indian people shop there, I must be getting the authentic stuff. 

It was also the perfect recipe for using up the fresh mint I got with our produce CSA and some cilantro I picked from my balcony garden.

I got this specific brand of curry paste - Patak's.

http://www.pataks.co.uk/

It's what my recipe and Googling told me to buy.

And it was delicious.  The baby even had a few bites to eat, though we had to give her the "inside" pieces of the chicken so there wasn't too much spice on it.

But what to do with the leftovers?

Ah, more CSA items to be used up.  For lunch today, I took some summer squash, some kind of turnip that's apparently usually grown in southeastern Asia and a half of an onion and tossed it in a pan with some chicken broth.  I added two heaping (yes, heaping.  I like things spicy) spoonfuls of the Vindaloo paste to the pan, and about ten minutes later, we had lunch.  (The baby did NOT eat any of this.  Will coughed a bit when he ate it, but said it was very tasty, so I took the hint: not everyone enjoys the amount of spice that I do!)

Overall, these CSA's are forcing me to learn how to cook different cuts of meats and use different vegetables.  And our money is going to local farmers.  And I can feed my kiddo organic, grass-fed meat and organic veggies.  I like it, and thankfully my husband is a good sport about some odd meal combinations here and there.

Tomorrow, I plan to try a honey and wine braised lamb rib recipe.  The recipe tells me to do it in the oven, but I, being the rebel I am, will use my NEW crockpot for it.

NEW CROCKPOT, you say?!?!?

Why, yes!

TWO new crockpots, actually!!

I had been looking for a small crockpot for awhile at garage sales, on craigslist, etc.  But everything was either just too darn far away to drive or too expensive.  ($15 for a used, super old crockpot?  really??)  But Target had them on sale today, so I splurged and spent a whopping $27 on TWO new crockpots - a 4 qt. and a 2 qt.  My 6 qt. is still going strong, but considering that crockpots do best when they are 2/3 of the way full, sometimes I want to make things that, well... I don't WANT 4 quarts of!

I also plan on trying to make steel cut oats in the crockpot for Will to eat in the mornings.  Sometimes, when he gets up for work super early and is all hungry and stuff, I feel like a bad wife for not getting up and making breakfast for him.

(But I never feel badly enough to actually get up and make him breakfast.)

SO that's where the new little crockpot comes in.  I can make a tiny single-serve portion of all of these different kinds of oatmeals I found on this website.  Some of them look absolutely amazing!  And when Will gets up in the mornings and I want to burrow under my soft, soft comforter, I can rest assured that he isn't eating gravel for breakfast.

Unless I've made it wrong.  Which is entirely possible.