Quiet Weekend and Loads of Zucchini

Even though it was a short work week, it felt like it took years to get through. I don’t think I ever fully recovered from our long weekend and I think that must have been the case with everyone else last week. It seemed that we were all lethargic and pretty cranky. Needless to say, I was really looking forward to this weekend and doing pretty much nothing. As a matter of fact, one of my major goals was to see if I could make it through Saturday without actually getting dressed.


Roger has been renovating the kitchen of our good friend’s parents. One of the perks of this particular job is we get fresh vegetables from her garden. Last week, Roger brought home two huge (I mean huge!) zucchinis and some tomatoes. I decided to make a spaghetti sauce with the tomatoes as well as some other fresh vegetables and herbs we had on hand. Once I had the sauce simmering, I turned my attention to making the spaghetti only to find out that we didn’t have enough all-purpose flour. So, in keeping with my daily goal of not getting dressed, I decided to try my hand at whole-wheat pasta. It came out and it tasted pretty good, but I have to say that from now on, if I’m going to go through the trouble of making pasta from scratch, it’s not going to be whole wheat. If I wanted the healthier, less refined pasta, I’d rather just buy it and skip the work of actually making it. We also had some ripe bananas that needed to be used (I hate wasting food) and since I had no flour to make banana bread, Roger got a banana cream pie for dessert instead (much to his delight).

I also used Saturday to cook some dishes to use up the zucchini. We had a stir fry, grilled zucchini, zucchini in our pasta sauce, and Moussaka (made with zucchini instead of eggplant). This got me through most of one (yes, it’s huge)zucchini. I plan on making some zucchini bread tonight, but I still have a lot of zucchini to get through and am running out of ideas…not to mention that we already have meals to last us for the next week, if not longer.

It was really hot this weekend, above 100 degrees on Sunday and neither Roger nor I felt motivated to spend any part of our days outside. Luckily, we get really good shade in the early evening when the sun starts to go down and our backyard becomes bearable about an hour earlier than our neighbors’. This allows us to still cook and eat dinner outside. And with Kaelyn being so messy, it’s nice to not have to worry about her getting food bits all over the kitchen. So, the only time we ventured out of the house was to eat and play with Kaelyn outside in the evening and on to night (our fireplace helps keep us warm if it gets too chilly). Other than that, we were content to lounge around all weekend doing a whole lot of nothing.

The week ahead looks a lot like last week, except that it seems that everyone is in a better mood. Hopefully, this means that Roger and I will have enough energy to go back to our regular weekends of doing something fun with friends.