Every once in awhile...

Every once in awhile, I get an enormous amount of stuff done in very little time.  I fancy myself a productive gal, but every month or so I hit a "sweet spot" of hyperproductivity...and just when I start to feel like, "hey, this is the new me!", it is gone.  Just like that.  Oh well.  It was nice while it lasted.  Here are the pictures that prove this wasn't all in my mind.  Some of the pictures are stolen from recipe sites--despite what it seems, I do NOT take pictures of everything that happens in my life. ;)

First, I made THE MOST YUMMY P.F. Chang's Lettuce Wrap knock off.  

http://iowagirleats.com/2011/04/26/p-f-changs-lettuce-wraps-remade/

Then, I made a whole batch of make-ahead oatmeal.  This is such an easy time saver in the morning.  This recipe is for the blueberry maple oatmeal, but if you look around a little at the site you will find a bunch of other combos.

http://www.theyummylife.com/recipes/220/Blueberry+Maple+Refrigerator+Oatmeal

THEN, I made Sally's Granola Recipe...this oatmeal-honey-flax-walnut-peanutbutter-cocoa mix is pure heaven, my friends...and yet, sadly, there is no picture to prove it ever existed in my kitchen.   But trust me--before it was INHALED, it was glorious.

I turned my attention back to thoughts of dinner, with Ronaldo's Beef Carnitas from allrecipes.com.  I altered this recipe by using the crock pot to make the meat, and I assembled it all in those couple hours of superhuman cooking. I then stuck it in the fridge to enjoy the next day's simplicity of pulling the crock pot from the fridge, plopping it into its heating element, turning it on low, and forgetting about it until dinner time.

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/ronaldos-beef-carnitas/detail.aspx

After all the kitchen related fun was done, I moved on to the most daunting task ever.  Grooming Charlie.  Yes, it looks like a non-typical setting for a groom...scissors, brushes and clippers strewn about on my family room floor...but, well, I don't know what to say about that.  What Charlie had to say about that was the best of what canines can offer by way of passive aggression.

The day before, Moo had been reading about Ghandi and his acts of civil disobedience and passive resistance.  Charlie became the object lesson for these principles, right before our eyes.  He slowly slumped to the ground and gently rolled on his back...

...and then he wriggled back and forth, while licking my hand that clutched his paw on every pass.

He was up on all fours for 5 seconds.

Yes, that is the vacuum cleaner.  If he hadn't been such a stinker, I may have felt bad about scaring him with it.

Then at lunch time we went and met up with some friends from NCC in Nashville.

This is a little off topic, but I thought I'd throw it in here anyway.  This is my dear Moo, who faithfully attends to her academic studies despite the craziness that is happening around her.  This year in science she is studying high school level Biology.  I will post more about that later.