HJ Waxing Moon

I've discussed before what my method of menu planning is. It hasn't changed much with it just being the two of us agin, except that if we don't do it, there's no one to suffer but ourselves! The basics boil down to: Know what you have in the fridge. Know what's in season/on sale. Know your schedule and be reasonable about what you can accomplish. Make the most of the time you spend cooking.  With our more-limited freezer space, I find we now focus less on freezing heat & eat foods, and more on having versatile ingredients on hand to make a variety of meals fairly quickly. Instead of making a pan of broccoli mac to put right into the oven, using freezer space for noodles that could otherwise be dry storage and ingredients that can only be used for one possible meal, we have pre-roasted chicken shredded and frozen in meal-size packages just waiting to be casserole, tacos, a pre-made pasta salad for lunches, and more. We buy foods and store them with th...

Content warning: Brief mentions of ED and I don't mean the penile kind. Some discussion of Feels and their relation to food choices, with some coping mechanisms that work for me. Everyone can suffer through blood sugar crashes, and there are some doctors who believe that our modern society's abuse of our pancreas is the number one reason for diabetes that shows up later in life. Whatever your opinion on this topic is somewhat immaterial for the purposes of this conversation. However, if you are dealing with a diagnosed medical issue and not simply bad habits, do ensure you speak to your doctor before taking the advice of random people on the internet. My blood sugar crashes are due to so many issues you could write a book. Eating disorder, chronic nausea, lack of appetite, chronic dehydration, medication side effects, and sheer bad habits, just to name a few. What this looks like in my daily life seems simple: I wait too long to eat. Now, as you may have already gathered, I...

I would number this, but I've been struggling with Dandruff for as long as I can remember and could not possibly tell you what attempt number this is to get rid of it or to find a routine that keeps it manageable. The internet seems to think there are two kinds of scalp maladies: dry skin and dandruff. The internet also seems to think that you can't get fluffy clouds of tiny white specks if you have dandruff (characterized by thick or large chunks of white or yellow gunk) but to that I say Bah Humbug. Because I clearly get both, and there is no way this is "just dry skin." You can Google dandruff if you really want more science. I'm not reinventing the wheel here, and you're going to get a much better education on the topic if you do. What I'm worried about is the fact that my dandruff has gotten so bad over the last two to three years. So bad that I'm scratching incessantly some days. So bad that it's in my ears, and I will obsessively pick un...

This actually started out as a comment on OffBeat Home's 7 ways to eat healthier food on a budget. There we were discussing make-ahead soups, freezing & reheating for work lunches. Someone asked how you'd freeze them, in individual containers or larger ones. This is my response: While certainly not private, that's a surprisingly personal question. How you choose to do it will have a lot to do with your budget, values, and routines. For space and best quality as far as freezer-burn goes, the best bet is going to be ziplock bags. Get the good kind with a double lock (NOT the ones with the zip-tabs), fill with the amount of *cooled* soup you want (one serving, two, four, whatever) up to about 3/4 of the bag while it's sitting on its bottom, and zip, getting as much air out as possible. Lay in a stack in the freezer and it takes up the least amount of space. However, this means thawing in the fridge overnight before transferring to a dish for transporting & reh...