One more crazy week, one still to go before this month – that turned out to be more intense and challenging than expected – is over.
To survive this week, I cooked a few things during the weekend: in the picture above, whole grain rice with roasted butternut squash with paprika, turnip greens (grelos in Portuguese) and toasted almonds. Accompanied with baked salmon with onions and capers, a staple dish in our house that came from dinner a large number of years ago at this girl’s house. I only saw her once, but the balance was definitely positive.
Other recipes from the weekend: frango com ervilhas e cenouras, homemade granola for our 4 o’clock snack (lanche in Portuguese or goûter in French), that I adapt from Smitten Kitchen’s recipe (it’s in her book, which is one of my favourites), and leite creme to use up the yolks left over from making the granola. All this cooking and a few leftovers set us up for the first half of the week, and when you have a Toddler jumping around, this really saves time and a few hangry tantrums.
We took Toddler to a birthday party and she talked about it all week. It was in one of these big spaces full of trampolines, coloured balls, stray tricycles and bouncy castles – all set up to be a big, messy nightmare for parents, but the kids have so much fun bouncing around all afternoon, that it’s quite fun to watch them. Toddler was so ecstatic she managed to fall with her face on the floor from jumping – on the normal floor – with joy and excitement.
It’s been very, very cold this week. The fireplace has been working every evening. We attempted a walk in the forest on one afternoon, but with the cold and early nightfall, we headed home with our friends for apéro.
Last week I started tracking two new habits: reading 20 minutes every day, and doing a few pushups (I’m so bad I’m actually ashamed to tell anyone how many). I have already failed miserably at both habits (my largest streak was 3 days – lame). But I will keep trying!
I took a day trip to Zurich mid-week. I left very early in the morning and came back as soon as the event was over, so I could catch Toddler before bedtime. I whizzed through the city and saw very little, but enough to make me long for travelling a little more, and remembering I don’t need to go very far to discover new cities. This is the kind of thing that is going back up in the calendar for sure – virus restrictions allowing.
Heading into the next week, hoping that after November is over everything will quiet down a little, and we can get Toddler on board with some nice Christmas activities I’ve been thinking about!