The Weekend Stretches Out Before Me

A glorious winter weekend is sitting right in front of me, waiting to be filled with good stuff, and I’m almost paralyzed by the lack of plans.  Does this ever happen to you?

It doesn’t help that I’m feeling a little flattened by the workweek that just ended.  It wasn’t a bad week, not at all, but it was still exhausting.  I suppose that’s true for every week, but I wasn’t feeling my best this week and I don’t think I got enough sleep.  By Friday, I was ready for a deep rest.  But then, at about 3 AM this morning, I woke up feeling the strangest pressure in my chest, a circular-shaped pressure, like a heavy tire was sitting on me.  In my sleep-induced delirium, I wondered if I was having a heart attack.  I also felt really hot, so I threw off the covers and laid down on the cool couch, waiting for the painful pressure to subside.  Eventually, the hot feeling passed and I started feeling a little cold, so I went back to bed.  I don’t remember if the pressure dissipated before I fell asleep, but when I woke up again this morning, it was gone.  How very strange.  I hope it wasn’t a heart attack.  I’m a little young for that sort of thing.

Perhaps it was last night’s mojito doing strange and mysterious things to my brain.  At any rate, I feel fine now, other than some mild weekend lethargy, which I’m hoping to shake off once I get moving on today’s plan.  The most important question each weekend is this: what to cook?  Because whatever I make this weekend will form the backbone of my lunches and dinners for most of the week.  After some hemming and hawing, I have finally figured out a game plan, two-thirds of which involves In the Kitchen with a Good Appetite.  Behold, a three-part plan:

* My friend a’s Pumpkin Black Bean Soup.  Three cheers for pumpkin soups!  Especially ones that pair deeply savory ingredients and a delicious combination of spices with pumpkin’s earthy sweetness.

* From In the Kitchen: Sausages with Sweet Peppers and Onion Stew and Fried Croutons.  I’m going to substitute my new favorite veggie sausages and possibly make my croutons Daphna-style, but otherwise, this recipe will be my template for a hearty, winter dish filled with vegetables.  I’m tempted to add a can of beans, but we’ll see…

* Also from In the Kitchen: Crispy Tofu with Garlicky Peanut Sauce.  I wanted to make this dish last weekend, but I just couldn’t make myself go back out into the rain to buy the ingredients I didn’t have on hand.  Melissa Clark describes this one as “lightly sweet, very spicy, and utterly divine” (my emphasis).  I’m sold.

It’s sunny but cold here today, so I’d like to bundle up and go for a walk, preferably with camera in hand.  I’m pretty sure that my favorite neighborhood mural was painted over, which is totally disappointing, but I’ve got to go check it out myself.  Do we hate art in this town?  Or did the suspected political nature of this piece offend someone?  I still have no idea who those men are, but I liked the mural.

In other news, my writing studio remains cluttered with boxes and other treasures that I can’t seem to organize, but this weekend, I think I have a new plan for taming the box collection.  It’s funny how I spend so much time in this room of my apartment, and yet it’s the one that is least organized.  I have, however, been hanging things on the walls, which will please Matt, who feels like this place is some sort of mental asylum with its lack of art or other things of interest on the walls.  I can’t help it: bare walls don’t distress me.  I find them sort of soothing.

I mentioned before that I’m insanely far behind on recipe posts, and that’s still true.  I suspect a recipe for Christmas cookies is going to show up here in February (you don’t mind, right?), but that’s the way it goes sometimes.  I’m still excited about these posts; I just can’t keep up with all my ideas for the blog.  This weekend, I am going to work on my reading list for 2011.  I’m feeling particularly inspired by some of the reviews on a’s goodreads bookshelf, which I think I could spend hours perusing.  Is there anything better than book recommendations from a friend?  Maybe recipe recommendations, but frankly, if I don’t have to choose, I’ll take both.

Happy weekend, everyone!