Be Gentle With You

Two kind of amazing things:

1. I can’t remember what Pepsi tastes like. I mean, I know it is bubbly and sweet…but I can’t really remember it. Huh.
2. I kind of didn’t recognize my fingers this morning. I mean, I watched them reach for a tea bag, and it struck me that they didn’t look like mine.
   Mine are pudgy, and the knuckles are really big. The hand in this picture may just look like a regular middle aged hand to you. Its fingers are kind of short and stubby…but they are slim-ish, and they don’t look like mine. I really wish I had taken a picture like this 25 days ago, but it didn’t occur to me to take one of my flat hand.

The last couple of days have been pretty fun with regard to Whole 30 foods. Yesterday, I made the Shepherd’s Pie recipe that Jen Hatmaker shared, but I traded the mashed sweet potato topping for white mashed potato topping. I also skipped the weird flax issues…it’s perfect with some tomato paste and a splash of Whole 30 compliant beef broth to make the sloppy-joe-textured beef mixture. I also used ghee instead of butter in the mashed potato part. Here are some pictures of that process. It was absolutely fantastic.
Sage loved it, too. I think we loved it because it wasn’t trying to be anything else. I guess the flax stuff was trying to be a thickener…but we didn’t do that and didn’t need it. So, we just had a fabulous ground beef and veggie goulash kind of thing with mashed potatoes on the top. Like it said, Yum!

And this evening, I came home quite late for dinner. Grabbed one of my salad containers that I really better eat today because I packed it on Monday evening – and it’s Thursday – and headed to the back yard with the dogs for some mellow meal time on a gorgeous North Carolina evening. These poor dogs do not know if the food I have is anything they would like to eat at all. They never know. They just always want what I have. I could have a bowl of raw onions, and they would sit by me, just hoping I would share. Zero times have I given them food from the table. Zero times has their patient begging been rewarded. And yet…this is who I shared my mealtime with this evening: (Roxy, in the back, has much better manners than Eleanor Rigby, who is 1 year old, and still learning about not being in my face when I eat.)