I was on a tear trying out new recipes this weekend. The chicken enchiladas were Friday night (they were a keeper, the ONLY one of the weekend), then Saturday lunch was not a new recipe, it was stuffed shells I made two pans of in August and froze for later. Saturday night was uh, some kind of meat (it is just SO wrong that I can’t remember what we ate on Saturday night, must not have been spectacular) and a new recipe for potatoes I wanted to try.

This was good, but I am not sure it was good enough for the effort. That was a lot of work, several dirty dishes,  and they were not that amazing. Not as good as my go-to fattening potato recipe, that is for sure (which I will have to post later because I can’t find it right now…).

Saturday I went to Showers of Flowers, a large local yarn store, on a quest to find some yarn that I THOUGHT I bought enough of when I started the project, but apparently had not, after tearing my studio apart to find the proverbial missing skein. From my internet search, it appeared that this color was now discontinued. However, Showers of Flowers still had 3 skeins, so I bought two. And then I did a little happy dance around the store.  So now I have enough yarn to finish my shawl/shrugigan (which they call the Nancy shrugigan but I call the Christi shrug because my friend Christi made one first) (and it says one skein in the pattern but I used a different yarn because I LIKE TO MAKE MY LIFE DIFFICULT) but I am working on a million other Christmas  and niece/nephew projects.  Plus, I was so inspired by finding the yarn I needed that I bought more yarn, for a different project. Plus a few skeins that were on sale that I am sure I will have a use for.

I also went to the Trollheim Lodge Sons of Norway Christmas craft sale. I bought some new refrigerator towels. These are always good to have. And my old ones are getting very, very stained. I guess I need to do like my mom does and SOAK them in something good (not pure bleach, I guess) to see if it helps. But now I have two new, cheery ones. I have a hard time letting go of some of the old ones because my Grandma made some of them, so I am attached to them.

I THOUGHT I was done with the Octopus Juggling quilted wall hanging, but I did not do the hanger right. I guess there is a reason they make the hanging sleeves on quilts so wide – if you make it narrow, it makes the top of the quilt stick out oddly from the wall. So I am going to have to tear that off and do something different. This not helping with my goal of “finish one quilt a month.”

See it bulging?

There, see it NOW?

Sunday lunch was not something I am going to cook again, so we will just move on from that. Sunday dinner was Honey Butter Pork Tenderloin.   This made the house smell like I was making bread or cookies. The sauce wasn’t too strong on the pork loin, but it didn’t really do much for us either. It was just OK. I think I will stick with my old standard,  which I have only done on the grill. Maybe I will try it in the oven this winter. I think the secret to a good pork tenderloin is standing by with the meat thermometer and pulling that bad boy off the heat when it reaches 145°.

We also had Cheesy Corn, from a recipe I found in one of my Mom’s Reminisce magazines. I don’t know what I was expecting, but this was not as fabulous as I had hoped. It was corn. With cheese. I would rather use my cheese on something else exciting. Ken even turned down the leftovers, so he really didn’t care for it.

Here is the whole plate, including mashed potatoes that were kind of an experiment too, as I had made a while bunch a few weeks ago and froze them. They were OK, needed some extra sour cream to perk them up. No complaints from Ken at least.

Not a stellar job of plating, Iron Chef judges would deduct for presentation.

MaryAnne says she is deducting points because we should have just given HER the cheese instead of putting it on that corn.