General sense of inadequacy, soothed by food

Yet another weekend has gone by in which I have not enjoyed enough free time, nor have I gotten done all the things that were on my weekend list to do. I keep wrestling between the desire to buckle down, work the whole weekend, and at least get caught up on everything, and the desire to just take a day off and goof around a little and restore my sanity a bit, and I end up not doing either very well.

So, for a quickie post, I'll take up Phantom on her request for food blogging. This paradoxically can serve as a response to both the question "what's for dinner?" and the question "what are you craving that you can only get in Spain?" because my husband has attempted, for the first time, to reproduce my Awesome Sister-in-Law's famous albondigas. Literally this just translates as "meatballs," but that doesn't really do them justice, because they're meatballs cooked in a special secret sauce, served over crispy potatoes. I've never had them prepared this way outside of Spain, but LWI spent a chunk of time this afternoon slaving over the secret sauce, and oh baby does it smell good.

While he was doing that, I whipped up another favorite recipe, my Awesome Sister-in-Law's famous yogurt bread. I find this recipe oddly entertaining because it measures everything in proportion to the size of yogurt you use, so you just use the empty yogurt container to measure the other ingredients: two yogurts of yogurt, two yogurts of sugar, three yogurts of flour, half a yogurt of vegetable oil. (See, I'm chuckling just typing that out. I am so easily entertained, it's an embarrassment.) That plus three eggs (whip the whites first, and then mix in the yolks, then stir in everything else) [oops - and a couple of teaspoons of baking powder!] and a handful of frozen berries and/or chocolate chips, baked for 40 minutes or so, and you have yourself an excellent breakfast for the week.

It may sound from these two examples that we wouldn't know what to do with ourselves in the kitchen without my Awesome Sister-in-Law. The truth is that we managed for some time without her recipes, but we don't quite remember how, and truly those were darker days.