Fireside Dinner Menu # 24

This week’s menu has a lot of happy moments but my personal favourite was the paprika potatoes. You have to try them – I think you will want to braai them with everything.

My cornbread crust did not come out quite crusty enough, so please let me know if you managed to make it look like in the pic of the website!

The sliders came out beautifully as well, I did however assemble them and then baked them in the oven for a while as well. The slow cooker is your friend for the pulled chicken!

You can again download the menu with the links here:

The little things are important too

This morning, one of my beautiful friends shared a post on Facebook that caught my eye. You can read the whole post here, but, in essence, it encourages us all to acknowledge the fact that sometimes, we are trying to do too much. And we do not give ourselves and others credit for just… surviving.

The small hours found me awake this morning because my Labrador had insisted on going outside. Coming back to bed my brain was responsible for not being able to go back to sleep. I thought about all the little things that are currently challenging me. And one of these are that I feel that I am not doing enough. So my question is: why do we always want to do more? Is it comparison? The whole social media dilemma where we compare our own situations with the little glimpses we see of other’s lives.

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Fireside Dinner Menu # 23 – the week of the traybakes

I may or may not have mentioned before that these menu’s are not “real time” in that I only started posting these a while after I started logging our meals and recipes. Sometimes, therefore, you will get 7 unique meals but it would not always be Monday to Sunday. Sometimes I skip the confession that we had yet another takeaway or that we had cake for dinner (and with we I mean me) or that dinner involved something from a box that you could stick in the oven.

As I then type these up I am often reminded of a special meal or lovely company or something that did not come out as I intended it to. These recipes are therefore not only recipes but also little moments in time. And that my friends, is why I eat too much!

This week is also the week of the tray bakes. In essence it just means it is something that you spread out and stick in the oven. Gotta love it!

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The value of my debrief

If you know me, or you have been following these somewhat random notes of mine, you will know that these come from the mind of an overwhelmed overthinker.

The last two weeks have presented various hurdles, of which I will not go into detail now. Let us just say that having a routine checkup on Tuesday could land you in hospital on Thursday in the midst of work and parent chaos. Also, bad things don’t always just happen in threes… It could be multiples of three. Anywhoo, so I have not had my head attached correctly for a while and thus just doing some chaotic form of crisis management. So my excuse is that I did not have time, while the truth is probably that I was in a funk and did not feel like it.

Silence and stepping away from something do however always bring some time for reflection, self-doubt and avoidance – an ongoing spiral of the overthinker.

This afternoon I finally sat down and did a debrief. The purpose was to just get everything out of my mind and onto paper. Categorise, sort and try again. A lot of the last 12 months have been dedicated to figuring out how to manage my time effectively and juggle various responsibilities. Mostly because I was overwhelmed and this caused anxiety. Many of these little discoveries have been noted on this blog. I started implementing the bullet journal method. Most days this helps me to stay on top of things. On other days, however, things happen that were not on the list.

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