The Hunger Struck - Confessions of a Food Fanatic.

I have to confess that we eat yam and or sweet potato fries on an almost weekly basis. It’s written into our code of meal planning and we abide by it almost religiously. There are weeks where we decide to take a little break but they somehow always seem a bit lacking and are generally followed by a week of yam overindulgence. This was one of those weeks.

For the most part I keep the flavoring of these fries pretty simple, they don’t require much more than a little bit of olive oil, salt and pepper and a hot oven to taste amazing. This time however I got a bit fancy, just a bit, with some cumin, chili and garlic infused olive oil. They were a bit spicy and the freshly ground cumin was just the thing to take our favorite simple indulgence to the next level.

There are certain things that are just so easy to make and I don’t make them often enough. What I love most about poached pears is that you can sort of improvise with what you have on hand, there are so many flavor combinations that would make a lovely poaching liquid, that the possibilities seem endless.

I’m a major spice hoarder and after going through a few of my hidden Indian spice stashes, I settled on chai inspired flavors. Star anise, cardamon, black cardamon, cinnamon, red chili pepper I have to say it was very spontaneous and sometimes its that spontaneity that makes things turn out extra good.

I have been having one of those months where anything goes in the eating department. The amount of cakes, muffins, cookies and other not so great for you sweet baked goods I’ve had this month is sort of shocking. It’s actually probably been more like 2 months… I sort of lost count after Thanksgiving. Sigh.

In and effort to tone it down (it being my thighs) and avoid having to shop in the maternity section before my time, I decided to put some effort towards not eating so much bread and other extremely tempting glutonous products that I love so much for every meal. I’m still going to eat bread, because life would be extremely depressing without it, but just not for every single meal.

Ive had a huge butternut squash sitting on my counter for over a month now and I’m so relieved that I was finally able to use it! I was having my doubts, it’s harder than you think to use such an enormous amount of squash in the course of a few days when you are just feeding two people. Little did I know that this was one of the best things I could have done.

I’ve heard all of those theories that squash is better once allowed to ripen for several weeks, even several months but have never bothered to to test that out. For the most part I buy what I’m going to eat in the near future and have never really been a person to think ahead in this way.

I’ve been neglecting the huge stack of new magazines purchased over the past few months and have been feeling somewhat guilty recently because I have made no effort whatsoever to rectify the situation. I’ve come to a point where the pile has become somewhat intimidating – there are just too many of them and I don’t know where to start.

I have a small disorder that prevents me from making this process any easier where I have to make recipes in chronological order starting from the first magazine I bought to the last. I won’t go into too much detail here because it’s actually quite sick. Let’s just say that when you start experiencing strong guilt issues with objects you may need to reevaluate a thing or two.

This becomes especially problematic in this situation because the first magazine I bought was entirely dedicated to really fancy cakes off all shapes and sizes, the sort that requires time I currently don’t have. Not to mention that it wouldn’t hurt me to cut down on the cakes of all shapes and sizes… I have to confess that I made that truly amazing Harvest Butternut Squash Loaf again yesterday, twice in 4 days, that has to be a record.