Day Seventeen: Successes, Failures

Well, remember the garlic-spinach-tomato sauce from last week? This week, the plan was to make a hee-ooge batch of it, since it was so tasty. And, to make things much easier, I decided to use frozen spinach. Terrible idea, people. The bag of frozen spinach, when defrosted, reverted to what looked like lawn clippings with no visible leaf structure, just a large, dense mass. But I cooked it in garlic anyway, and proceeded to pour over a few cans of tomatoes. The red was instantly absorbed into the lurking greeney black mass. I added a few more. Again, it disappeared.

The upshot is a truly unsightly mush. It's edible--barely--but not lively and actively tasty the way the fresh-spinach batch was. I worked my way through a portion at lunch today. An hour later, this email came from my husband:

Choking down a bowl of orzo and, it appears, the muck what dripped off the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Hardcore.

Does it look like said muck? You decide:

(Is it possible new life is being created in the primordial ooze?)

I think I'm going to divide the remaining amount into fourths and try to absorb each one into something else. An omelet, perhaps. Maybe mix with yogurt for a dip? Ideas welcomed, since I don't see us eating any more of it straight.

It's not all sad meals here, though. As a corrective for the terrible image above, here's tonight's dinner cooking on the stove.

(chicken with garlic and balsamic; onions and peppers caramelizing,
whole grain rice in the pot in back.)

But enough of the food challenges. I have another question--is anyone else having unusual trouble sleeping? I've been waking up in the middle of the night multiple times. And that is not normal for me. It's making a mockery of all attempts to get a full 8 hours, and subsuming the second half of my days in tired crankiness.