Recent Life in Pictures (and a few words)

Recent life has been busy. Very busy. Amid all the busyness, though, life moves along. Here are some pictures and commentary from recent life:

This is our third Christmas together. Instead of taking time to decorate the three together as we have done for the past two years, I worked on some sort of organizational project while Mark set up the tree and put lights and tinsel on it. Then while he worked on something (maybe food-related?), I put ornaments on the tree. So, instead of a nicely planned picture in front of the tree this year, we have the picture below, which is more in the spirit of, “Oh, we should probably document this with a photo or something.”

 

We’ve been trying new recipes as a result of our sugar detox, or sugar fast, or whatever you might want to call it. One of the new recipes we tried is a Spaghetti Squash Lasagna, recipe found here. This was my first time using spaghetti squash, and it secured my affection. The lasagna was quite good too. This picture, of it in a left-over container, about a week after we made it, doesn’t do it justice:

Here’s another spaghetti squash that we’re going to cook and freeze for future spaghetti squash lasagna:

This is a delicious sugar-free granola recipe that I found from this blogger. It does use Stevia to sweeten it, which tastes sweet but doesn’t cause an insulin reaction like real sugar does in a body. It’s got a lot of almond slivers and a lot of coconut. Mmmmm.

Today has also been quite productive, though not exciting. Mark is at work, which for some reason usually makes me more productive at home. I’m boiling the beans, pictured below, and I also spent time working on this Home Management accordion folder. I tried to have a Home Management binder like so many excessively organized bloggers seem to have, but that just didn’t work for me:

Here are beans cooking, for some Lime Cilantro White Bean Hummus that I will make later this week:

Here’s the menu for the party, at which I will serve the Lime Cilantro White Bean Hummus. I know there are cookies and blondies on the list of food. Don’t be alarmed. I plan to exercise incredible willpower while mixing up the batter for these. I won’t touch them at all. In all honesty, cutting out sugar cold turkey is a lot easier for me than trying to limit my sugar consumption. If it’s completely out of the question, then I can’t try to reason myself into thinking that one cookie is okay. So, don’t worry.

And this is my tea cupboard, organized. Really, it doesn’t look that different, except that I took all loose leaf teas out of their bags with twistie-ties and put them into jars, with labels on the lids. Please ignore the embarrassing amount of tea I have on hand.