The obvious answer is that, no, a hammer is not the right tool for the job when it comes to sweet potatoes–Seriously, though, when I first starting working with sweet potatoes, I admit to taking a hammer to the crappy knife I was using. These days, I have a much nicer knife at my disposal: It’s a Shun Pro Nikiri knife that my roommate splurged for a couple years ago. It’s not in the budget right now, but I might put that on our wedding registry 🙂 it’s a NICE knife..
And with it, I made quick work of the potatoes, the onions, the garlic… If I hadn’t been stopping to take pictures, it would have come together in 15 minutes tops. Accidental discovery: I used steel wool to scrub the sweet potatoes and afterwards, it was not necessary to peel them. I loved the amount of time I saved.
This is one of those meals that I kept simple and let the flavors speak for themelves. Keeping things simple in round 1, makes it easier to re-use the left-overs for round 2. I put onion and garlic in the bottom of the roaster, put the pork-roast in the middle, and then snuggled the sweet potatoes in beside. I put more minced garlic on top of the pork-roast so that the flavor could run down and mingle with all of the other flavors
- Bloggity
So, if you’re here for the food portion of my blog, that’s about it for now. Thanks for stopping by, hitting the subsribe button, following a pin, etc.
Now, on to self reflection!!!
My fiance texted me a picture that he had snapped of me one of these (fairly recent) days. I was aghast! Maybe it was the fuzzy pajama pants, maybe it was foreshortening, maybe it was a harsh reality that I do not want to accept, but all I saw in that picture was just big. Big pink-and-white-fuzzy-pajama swathed me. Fast asleep. Now, I was embarrassed enough to blush and ashamed at how I looked and just wishing I could make the picture go away. But then I took a deep breath, and calmed myself down a bit…. and I texted him back.
Me: So, what do you see when you look at that picture?
Jeff: I took it a few days ago, when you were sleeping 🙂
Me: […] I said what do you see when you LOOK at it?
Jeff: Adorable. Fuzzy Toby [our cat], Fuzzy blankie, fuzzy pants.
And I knew that if we were in person, he would have that loving grin on his face that radiates to me “you’re too stinkin cute!”
That helped me to take a step back and stop looking for all the imperfections in the photo and criticizing how huge my … looked and how I hate xyz. I looked at how peaceful I looked. How I was snuggled with the blanket the way I would’ve snuggled with Jeff had we been sleeping instead of me just napping in the middle of the afternoon. How the cat decided that I had a great idea and nestled into a little fuzzy purr-bucket against the middle of my back. He saw his family, there, not a porky! If only I could learn to see myself through his eyes 100% of the time.
If I delete every photo of me that I think is unflattering, I’m not just hiding evidence of my weight, I’m deleting memories from people who cherish them–myself included. So no, I’m not perfect yet, and yes, I still shrink from the camera-lens some days… but part of my “journey” (so overused..but what other word is there?) is to accept myself for who I am, how I am, every day. Because, little by little, I’m realizing that if I am not happy in life where I am, being skinny will not make me any happier.
Today’s goal is to get 8 hrs of sleep. As long as I shut my eyes within an hour, I should just make it 🙂
And as a bonus feature (if you read this far) here is why the pics of the food are always close-cropped, lol:
