The long short month

Welcome to February! It our quadrennial long shortest month with Leap Day at the end. This will be a busier month than usual for me, and in fact it already has been. That’s partly why I’m already a day behind in my blogging schedule.

I had at least two posts planned for yesterday, but I had other plans for the day and simply didn’t have time to get to it. Then I fell asleep in my my chair watching TV, and didn’t wake up until after midnight. It happens sometimes. So, too, does skipping days for this blog, along with days with multiple posts. Yesterday was the former, today is the latter. Like I said, it’s already been a busy month.

Yesterday, I was having some of the family around to my place for dinner because some had plans for Friday. I wanted to have them around early in the month because I plan on doing several projects this month, and the house will probably be untidy while I work on them. The thing about it is that the projects—which I’ll talk about at the time I do them—won’t, by themselves, be noticeable to visitors, though I’m hoping that once they’re done, there will be noticeable changes. All of which will make sense when I talk about the projects specifically.

To get ready for both things, I went out Wednesday evening to save me time on Thursday. It was a hot day on Wednesday, and going in the evening was cooler, and the shops less crowded—wins abounded.

I first went to a home centre to pick up a few supplies for some small projects I’m doing over the coming week, ones unrelated to the larger projects I have have planned for this month. Then I went to the supermarket on the way home to pick up some things for Thursday night.

I decided to serve the two vegetarian dishes I make often: The Red Lentil Dahl (which was actually vegan) that I first made back in 2022 and still make often. The other dish was a Fajita Penne Pasta with Capsicum, which I also got from the YouTuber I got the other recipe from—in the same video, actually. This second dish was vegetarian, not vegan, because it has some cheddar cheese and some milk (though there are vegan substitutes for both, of course). Everyone seemed to like them.

I’d never shared them with the family, for no reason—I just didn’t, though it was probably because I had the family round so rarely last year that I just didn’t have the chance. At any rate, I wanted family to try them because I like them so much, and, to be honest, to show them that vegetarian (and—gasp!—vegan) dishes can be yummy.

As I’ve said in the past, I am not vegetarian or vegan—I’d call myself “flexitarian”, if anything. But long ago my doctors told me to severely limit meat consumption, and vegetarian/vegan meals are the perfect way to do that while still having yummy, nutritious food.

This has been a journey: At first I looked for meat substitutes (which I blogged about at the time), but then I decided that letting the ingredients lead was the best option, and not making meals with imitation meat. Part of the reason for that was that I became concerned about how highly processed most of those meat substitutes are, and I wanted to simplify my cooking, using simpler ingredients, as unprocessed as possible/practical. I’m absolutely not evangelistic about any of this—at all—it’s just my way of dealing with health challenges in an easy way that’s simple, yummy, and affordable, and all of that is why I share it on my blog: Others may find my experiences useful.

At any rate, I knew the evening would go well, with yummy food and plenty of socialising. And that was supposed to be in a post last night. I guess in a sense, I’m now caught up.