Life of a Single Married Lady

As Lent begins, we Christians settle into about six weeks of self-reflection and penance,  echoing the time Jesus fasted and prayed in the desert for 40 days. While it's a solemn time of the year, we get to look forward to celebrating the Resurrection at Easter! Hooray! In the meantime, between our prayers, readings from the Lenten Little Black Book, work, family, and the current breath-stealing cold, people who don't normally eat fish (like yours truly) have to get creative on Fridays. Therefore, I present to you today and experiment gone right  (a happy accident!) in the world of broiled tilapia. Wil and I bought a Costco bag of frozen tilapia before Lent began, and the first tilapia recipe we tried was from the Food Network: broiled tilapia with mustard-chive sauce. This sounded just a little bit crazy (and super easy), so we decided to try it. It. Was. Amazing. Perfectly broiled fish, tangy and slightly sweet sauce...mmm-mmm-mmm. Broiled Tilapia with Mustard Chive S

Wil's job selling ridiculous amounts of window coverings means that his "weekend" doesn't actually happen on the weekend, so I had much of Saturday and Sunday to myself. Since I like to take soup for lunch (minimal preparation necessary before my 7:26am bus), I decided I'd make up a big pot of soup using a mashup of a few recipes and just see how it turned out. Here's a summary of my process! 1. Walk to the store and buy groceries. Make sure to get the aisle with the super cute little old checkout lady. 2. Walk home. Be a bum for a while, you can always shower later. Do some laundry. Find Thor  on TV while channel-surfing. Choose Thor  over Swamp People  and decide to start cooking. 3. Dump 2 cartons (64oz) of stock into a pot (I used 1 carton beef, 1 carton chicken, but veggie stock would work too). Add some salt, pepper, oregano, parsley, and other general Italian-type seasonings, and bring to a boil. 4. Add all your veggies to the boiling stock. I u

You may have noticed that the vast majority of my posts on this blog have something to do with food. I try to bring in travel, work, life, family, weather (I am an atmospheric scientist, after all, and we finally had a big snow here in Madison), but it really all comes down to food. It snowed here! Unfortunately, the city of Madison doesn't pull out the plows until after  the majority of snow has fallen.   On the plus side, our apartment complex looks like Narnia! I once asked a beloved family friend how to make a can of corn, and for a long time after that my specialties were sandwiches, scrambled eggs, and chicken baked in pasta sauce. Tasty, I'll grant you, but boring after a while. When Wil left for Alaska I decided to be more adventurous in my cooking, and I've been pursuing that ever since. It gave me a nice break from the stress of grad school, and now it's a fun challenge. It also important because of my newly discovered high cholesterol (thanks, Mom a