Simple Pleasures: Hosting Friends for Dinner

I tell you what. I am absolutely in love with cooking for friends and getting people together at my house. And for those reading this who’ve always enjoyed it, let’s just say this is a somewhat recent revelation of mine.

I used to stress out about having people over and it felt like work. The house had to be spotless. The dishes and napkins had to be perfect and the menu complex and “amazing,” and so on. I made it harder than it needed to be and in so doing made it exhausting and therefore rarely hosted.

In recent years- probably a combo of quitting alcohol and eating out less; embracing a vegan and then plant-forward lifestyle, I started getting into meal prep using plant based menus and a few new utensils for my kitchen like the Le Cruset pan and rad food processor among other things. A new and proper knife set, some cloth napkins, a newfound appreciation for produce (especially locally grown produce!) and a desire to up my game of nourishing my body as well as possible — led to more and more cooking and learning in my home kitchen.
…with that came some confidence that I could serve these foods to friends with good results.

The setting down of perfection as the goal and the embracing of authenticity instead allowed me to move away from caring about my house not being “perfect or spotless” and towards embracing the chance to connect with my fellow humans over a meal.

My house isn’t dirty or cluttered. It’s lived in.
It doesn’t look like it came from a magazine and not everything matches or is trendy and that’s ok. True friends - the people we want to invest our time into- don’t care.

And candidly if the house really is a mess or the meal is gross, these are the people who would love me enough to simply say that.
How refreshing.

…last night I invited a few of my neighbors and a new guy over for dinner, and got them all together for a meal; it filled me with so much joy. True joy. True connection. True laughter. True community. It was wonderful.

It ended up being a very jalepeno- forward meal… along with jalepeno flavored chips, I made one of my fave dishes- a vegan curry using butternut squash (including jalepenos because I love to add them to this recipe), served over rice and then I also made veggie fajitas (including jalapeños) (with optional ground beef) as well as homemade salsa.
With you guessed it- jalepeno in it. Recipes below.

My neighbor Nancy made the gorgeous raspberry pie. Erica prepared the pretty appetizer tray.

…we had fun. We laughed. We learned about each other. It was fantastic.

Ages ranged from 4-70s or so.
How beautiful is that ?!

The Pursuit of Happy-less: jarmazing

I’m having fun these first two weeks of 2020 working on ways to include and incorporate more LESS in my life. Yes that’s poor grammar- but it’s my way of saying I’m really feeding off doing away with stuff, combining stuff and even more importantly, reducing and eradicating waste- extra plastic- extra crap that I didn’t need and won’t buy again and can do without and can lengthen the lifetime of what I’ve got… that kind of headspace.
I present Jarmazing. This company makes plastic and stainless steel pump tops that allow you to convert BALL glass jars into your last-ever spot for shampoo/lotion/soap and so on.
I walked around my home and office collecting all of the half-used containers of hand soap that had accumulated. Read: I hadn’t paid attention to what I already had and just kept mindlessly buying more. Ugh.
I grabbed them all up and one at a time placed them upside down over the ball jar to drip inside. That in itself is a fun stress reliever. ;)

… the various soaps combined to make a different color AND given different densities it became a layered soap in the jar. Like a cosmopolitan of hand soap. Winning. I threw those plastic soap containers into the recycle bin, never to be replaced or repurchased again. I’ve honestly got enough hand soap here for a nice long time. And when it’s time to refill- trust me I’ll be looking for a different option that doesn’t involve buying something in plastic.
….homemade soap recipes anyone ?!

And PS- these lids even fit on tiny ball jars and other misc jars you probably have sitting around- such as this one above, it’s the coconut oil I buy from sprouts!