It was a quiet little Monday on this here frontier, as we gymed — I want that to be a verb, but it looks funny — planned, and started to do a little packing. Goodness gracious I am sentimental about some stuff and need to let it go!

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{Look! It’s me, happy when our stuff arrived here in Gordon’s Bay, all the way from Scotland…yay! It’s before I found out two plates and two bowls from our wedding china were broken and four more were chipped…boo! But look! I got back into those jeans last week…yay! But muffin top joined the reunion…booo!}

We are enjoying our time with Goo-Goo and Gammy, which means I am spending lots of time in the kitchen and I am really really enjoying it. My traditional repertoire is a little on the spicy side, so having HH’s sweet parentals down for two weeks forces me to break out of my spicy-as-an-occasional-substitute-for-taste habits and try some new things.

So far I’ve added Lemon-Caper Chicken and Lemon Risotto to the playbook. {They brought me lemons from Bloemfontein and I’m putting them to good use!} Rest assured I didn’t precisely follow those recipes. (Have I told you I’m allergic to precisely following recipes?) And I made an avocado-base pizza with roasted peppers and barbecue chicken. And mozzarella. Totally from scratch. Even the dough. My superwoman t-shirt arrives on Thursday.

And Pioneer Woman coached me on the pizza dough, and had a couple of other suggestions for me, which is why she’s my new best friend. Even though she’s busy with a new cooking show coming up, and keeping her awesome blog hopping, and signing cookbooks, and taking pretty pictures, and talking ’bout her dog, and whatever else is happening on the ranch, she still helped me out with another recipe or two for this week, and I just think that’s great. I might e’en cook some beef with some beer tomorrow.

So. I don’t have too much profound food-for-thought this Monday evening. But here are three things in case you just need this post to have a higher word count, like I do:

1. Baby Blake was a super-sweetie-pie at the dedication. And the Bear behaved himself rather well, too! Such life-giving words and prayers were spoken over him. It was lekker.

2. Hero Hubs posted a pretty new photo at Quiver Tree. Maybe you can mosey on over there and take a gander. And maybe it belongs on your fridge. Maybe I’m just chit-chatting.

3. I got a really bad perm in the fifth grade. Going through pictures today, I realised I repeated the mistake around the time I finished my first Master’s Degree. It’s good to learn from your mistakes. Instead of repeating them.

I bet Pioneer Woman would’ve stopped me.

xCC