#of course he’d want Olive Garden to sponsor him

[mando-abs]

Ngl Olive Garden partnering with the new Garfield movie is kinda cute

[peaches-of-1]

Day 8- Long Distance

All Day with You

Pairing: Reader x Jungkook | Word Count: 635

You had met Jungkook at a mall last year. You had reached for the same shirt. It was like Heaven on Earth when your eyes met his. Ever since then, you never saw anyone else. It was only Jungkook for you. But he lived on the other side of the world.

Sometimes he’d come visit you when he wasn’t busy. You know he’d be with you if he could…but he was busy being a famous and international idol. You asked him what his next project was and he said it had something to do with a new food sponsor.

You were getting lunch with a friend, so you had to stop texting. After entering the sandwich shop, you looked around for your friend. Before you could see them, you heard barking and a familiar dog ran towards you.

You picked them up, “Gurem?”Suddenly, you were greeted by your boyfriend’s loving face. “Kookie?!??!”

Your boyfriend hugged you as the other patrons clapped. There were cameras around, but you honestly could not give any shits. Jungkook was here. You thought he was in Korea or something.

“We have two days off, so I came here on the earliest flight. I really wanted to celebrate it with the one I love.” He kissed you. “I’m sorry about the cameras. I couldn’t say no.”

“I’m just glad you’re here, Jungkook.” You pulled away from the hug and kissed Gurem. “Did you miss me that much, puppy? Hmm, did you drag Kookie all the way here just so you could see me?”

The two of you sat down to each lunch and just talk. And talk. Catch up on things that would have been difficult to talk about over text. Things they thought they had forgotten. Retelling a story for the thousandth time.  Fans surrounded the three of you.

He explained that he was gonna take you on the most romantic date ever. It’d be filmed, and BigHit was basically paying for it, but most of it was his idea. Things you had talked about wanting to do, but never having the chance to. He’d have to leave tomorrow afternoon.

After lunch, you went to go see a movie and made out. Then it was a shopping spree. He wanted to get some new jackets and had promised the boys glasses and a necklace.

When nightfall came, we had a gorgeous dinner in a rented out Olive Garden and were then driven to a gondola ride station.

“A gondola ride under the stars.” Jungkook said. “I promised that we’d get to do it some day.” He yawned.

You held his hands, “Aren’t you tired? We don’t have to do this. You can go rest. I don’t want you pushing yourself for--”

He smiled, “It’s ok. I can sleep later. I want every moment with you to last, awake. C’mon.”

The both of you got into the boat and relaxed. During the ride, you pointed out constellations and talked about how beautiful the moon was. He typed on his phone as he sometimes did for notes. You didn’t mind. You did the same thing for writing. There were just some things you couldn’t bear to forget.

“Writing another song about me?”

“The person I’m in love with? Of course.” He kissed your jaw, then your cheek, and then your lips. “It’ll be even better since you’re here. My muse.”

Then you woke up. It was time to go to the airport. He hadn’t brought many things with him, so the hard part of packing was saying goodbye. The hardest part about that was saying it.

But you did. You watched from the gate as he boarded and waved goodbye even though you were sure he couldn’t see you anymore. He belonged to the sky now, but he was always yours.

[dashlung62-blog]

Easy Meal Planning Tips to Use Your CSA Share

This post is from KS contributing writer Becca Stallings of The Earthling’s Handbook, with photography assistance from her son Nicholas Efran, age 13.

Two years ago, I wrote up a handy 5-step plan for using all the vegetables you receive in a weekly crate from a Community-Sponsored Agriculture farm. That article tells you all about how a CSA works on a subscription plan to bring you several pounds of organic, locally-grown produce every week. Here’s a tool for finding a CSA in your area.

My family has bought a share in Kretschmann Farm near Pittsburgh every summer since 2001. It’s fascinating to see how each vegetable appears and disappears throughout the season, from early June through mid-November. The pattern is sort of predictable, yet every year is unique.

That’s why Katie asked me to write another “how to use a week of CSA veggies” detailing my experience in the last week of July but in a different year. As you’ll see, the veggies we got this year were somewhat different than two years ago at the same time. We used the same 5 steps of veggie stewardship, and out popped some very different meals! On the other hand, the green beans found themselves in exactly the same meal as two years ago!

Not just for CSA subscribers, this strategy works anytime you have a lot of fresh produce: from your garden, from the garden of someone who likes sharing, from spotting a lot of great deals in the store or farmer’s market, from foraging, from your friend who just couldn’t resist buying a case of beautiful eggplants, etc.

Quick Review: 5 Steps for Evaluating Your Veggies

When you pick up that pile of produce, ask yourself these 5 questions:

What to swap or give away?

What needs to be eaten in the next two days?

What can wait until later?

What needs to be preserved?

What’s the plan?

Answer the first 4, and then use your answers to develop your plan for finding each veggie a good home in this week’s meals, in your freezer or pantry stash, or in a friend’s stomach! My previous article gives more detail on each question and tips on how to categorize.

One Week’s Example: Our CSA Box

I’m going to talk you through another week working through the 5 steps in our kitchen, but first I’ll have to explain our starting point.

Before This Week

Two years ago, I was able to write up our week in veggies almost with a “clean slate”–some ingredients we already had in stock came into play, but most of our meals were based around the veggies we received that week.

This year, I had decided which week I would make detailed notes about our CSA, meals, and preservation–and then, midway through the week before, I realized that the surplus of certain vegetables in that week’s crate was pushing us into some activities that would affect the new week. Instead of a “Wednesday wild card” dinner, the meal we cooked on the night we get our CSA was planned to use up the previous week’s veggies! Also, we went into the week stocked up with a healthy breakfast/snack food.

Weather conditions this year have been perfect for cucumbers, zucchini, and eggplant. I have to admit we didn’t do so well with last week’s cucumbers: We ate one with hummus, we put one in a salad, our guinea pigs ate one, and we gave away two–but we still had 4 cucumbers that got mushy and went to the compost bin. That was really a lot of cucumbers!! We should have made Cucumber Salad, which preserves them for a couple of weeks.

Last week’s CSA gave us an even larger volume of zucchini than cucumbers! (We got 6 zucchini vs. 9 cucumbers, but some of the zucchini were larger.)

Luckily, zucchini can be cooked or frozen (Kaite has 6 great preservation methods). I shredded all of it in the food processor, baked 4 loaves of whole-wheat zucchini bread, packed up 4-cup portions to freeze, and set aside 2 cups of raw grated zucchini. Those 6 zucchinis turned into 18 cups of shreds!

Tuesday night’s dinner was a slightly awkward meal of zucchini pancakes and cucumber slices with yogurt-dill dip. (The dill also was from the farm, several weeks ago—we had hung it up to dry.) My partner Daniel made the zucchini pancakes from this recipe. (It calls them “fritters,” but we thought “pancakes” would sound more appealing to the kids.) He used sharp cheddar cheese instead of Parmesan. He’d made them the previous week as well, and we were pleased that both kids ate them without complaint–one using ketchup and the other maple syrup!

We’d used a big, dark-purple Italian eggplant in chili, but we still had two thin, lilac-colored Asian eggplants. One of them was curled into this cute shape that looks like an alien pet!

When we went grocery shopping Wednesday morning before seeing our new crate of veggies, I asked my 13-year-old Nicholas what we could make to use up the eggplant. He said he would cook with my help, and we would have kebabs of eggplant and onion “and more zucchini pancakes, for protein, because they have so much egg in them.” We still had a small onion left from last week, but I reminded him that we couldn’t be certain we’d get more zucchini—although it was likely at this time of year—so we might have to thaw some.

Wednesday

Here’s what we got in this week’s CSA share!

3 cucumbers

2 Italian eggplants and 1 Asian eggplant

potatoes

carrots

4 tomatoes

kale

3 onions

green beans

2 zucchini

coffee–Of course, that isn’t grown in Pennsylvania! Kretschmann Farm has a deal with Building New Hope, a Pittsburgh non-profit that partners with coffee growers in Nicaragua. For an additional fee, we get a pound of shade-grown coffee in our CSA box once a month.

Nicholas and I started work on the kebabs: He asked me to make the pancakes while he did all the rest, occasionally asking for advice.

Your kids can learn to cook, even if you don’t know where to start.

My 4 kids and I created the Kids Cook Real Food eCourse to help bring real food and independence to families all over. Over 10,000 kids have joined us and we’d love to invite you along for the adventure!

TELL ME MORE!

PLUS we’re so pleased to offer a little gift from our family to yours: “10 Snacks Your Kids Can Make” packed with our favorites for the road! GRAB THAT HERE!

I grated the smaller zucchini and adjusted the recipe to this smaller amount. I still used 1 egg and then added some breadcrumbs to soak up excess liquid. The pancakes held together pretty well, but frying them was very stressful!

I have a hard time with food that tends to burn on the outside before it’s cooked all the way through and that falls apart when you flip it. Daniel is more coordinated and less nervous than I am, so he was surprised when I thanked him so effusively for having made these before!

Meanwhile, Nicholas cut up the eggplants and tossed them with Real Salt in the colander. (This makes eggplant less bitter.) He cut the onion in big chunks and browned them in olive oil. Then he added the eggplant. He seasoned the vegetables with lemon juice, minced garlic, and bottled Tandoori Chicken Spice. He cooked them until the eggplant was soft and slightly browned.

He decided that the kebabs also should include slices of hard-boiled egg. I don’t boil eggs often enough to remember the timing, so he looked it up. He assembled a variety of kebab combinations.

The kebabs were delicious! They gave us an opportunity to teach our 4-year-old Lydia how to eat a kebab safely: One hand on each end; careful of the point! Eat it like corn on the cob. Don’t bite the stick!

I didn’t think the zucchini pancakes were really necessary along with hardboiled eggs–I would rather have had chunks of zucchini cooked along with the eggplant and onions–but their flavor blended in with the vegetables’ seasoning better than I expected.

We found that the kebabs reheated well in the toaster oven (400 degrees for 7-8 minutes) and were still good on Sunday when I finished the last ones.

Thursday

Nicholas wanted to make a salad of kale and cucumbers with strawberry vinaigrette like he’d made a couple of weeks ago. This time, he added fresh strawberries and a yellow pepper we’d just bought at ALDI.

What would go with the salad? Nicholas wanted garlic mashed potatoes (our CSA potatoes) and a can of cranberry sauce: “It’ll be like Thanksgiving!” I suggested baking some fish for a Fishgiving Feast, but it was a hot day and he didn’t want the oven on while he was making the salad.

Instead, he suggested fried eggs for the protein–those of us who like sunny-side-up eggs could put them on top of our mashed potatoes and break the yolk as “gravy” for the potatoes. I don’t think I’d ever tried this before. It was good! But it didn’t seem anything like Thanksgiving dinner, even though the cranberry sauce was a nice treat. I was feeling a little tired of eggs.

Daniel cooked the potatoes and eggs while Nicholas made the salad. By the way, if you happen to have a bag of frozen strawberries (mine were on sale at GFS!), an easy way to make strawberry vinaigrette is to thaw one big strawberry, which will become so soft that you can just mash it with a fork and mix in oil, vinegar, salt, and honey.

Friday

I cooked one of our classic favorite meals: Honey Apricot Tofu, Salty String Beans, and rice. This used up the green beans from the farm and one small onion. Here’s Lydia’s serving.

Saturday

We had so many leftovers that we didn’t cook anything new today! I ate one of the tomatoes as a snack.

Sunday

I made Creamy Lentil Coconut Curry with Roasted Vegetables. My array of vegetables was different this time: no peppers, broccoli, or green beans, but I did have zucchini. Gosh, that was a lot of eggplant!

It was a cool day by summer standards, so I didn’t mind being in the room with a 400-degree oven and a steaming saucepan—but I was glad we had enough rice left over from Friday that I didn’t have to coordinate cooking that, too!

I ended up with more than enough veggies for the curry, so I froze some for other uses of roasted veggies in the future. I also set aside a jar of raw, salted eggplant for Lydia, who loves to eat it (and refuses cooked eggplant) recently! I thought I’d heard something about raw eggplant being dangerous to eat, so I looked it up–a person her size would have to eat 2 or 3 entire raw eggplants to have toxic symptoms, and she eats no more than about 1/4 of an eggplant at a time. Whatever she doesn’t eat in the next few days, I can add to marinara sauce or anytime I want to cook up a few veggies for lunch.

Monday

Because Nicholas had made Thursday’s salad only big enough for a side dish at one meal, we still had a lot of kale. I collected other vegetables to cook with it to make Hummus and Vegetable Flatbread Sandwiches. This time I used kale, carrots, onion, and tomato from the farm, plus a red pepper from ALDI. I also threw in a handful of that salted eggplant.

I always think I have too much kale to fit in my skillet . . . but after I put in as much as can and cook it for a few minutes, it gets much less fluffy so that I’m able to mix in the rest of the kale.

I didn’t cook the tomato at all, just diced it and put it and the cooked veggies into the sandwiches after toasting them and then pulling them apart with tongs.

We had a jar full of delicious sautéed veggies left over. They make a great accompaniment to scrambled eggs for breakfast!

Recently we’ve been buying white-flour tortillas at Costco because they’re cheap and taste good, but they’re not all that nutritious. If you’re up for making homemade tortillas, try Katie’s whole-wheat tortillas or gluten-free, gum-free whole-grain tortillas!

Tuesday

Daniel and Nicholas made Salmon Limone with Couscous and Zucchini Ribbon Salad, a recipe Nicholas had found on the Hello Fresh website earlier this summer and made once before. (You don’t have to subscribe to their boxed meal kits to access their recipes–but if you see a recipe you like, make sure to print it right away rather than plan to read it from your screen! We’ve learned that sometimes their recipes “disappear” from the URL where we saw them and are hard to find again!)

Ironically, although Nicholas eagerly suggested this recipe when he saw zucchini and tomatoes in our CSA box, scheduling issues pushed this meal to the end of the week when we’d already used all our zucchini and tomatoes. But when I went to our neighborhood Giant Eagle supermarket to buy them (along with the salmon, lemon, scallions, and couscous) I found great prices on zucchini and tomatoes from Brenckle’s Farm, another local organic farm that also offers a CSA. It’s only 26 miles away; Kretschmann Farm is 28 miles from our home. So we were still eating local, organic vegetables!

This meal was delicious!

Wrapping Up the Week

How did we do with our 5 steps?

What to swap or give away? This was one week when we kept everything in our share!

What needs to be eaten in the next two days? Fresh green beans last only a short time without getting moldy. We also prioritized cucumbers, kale, and zucchini but didn’t actually get through all of them in the first 48 hours–but we used them up within the week (see below) without anything spoiling!

What can wait until later? We still have some of the carrots and the coffee. These tomatoes were firm enough to be used late in the week but wouldn’t have lasted much longer.

What needs to be preserved? Roasting and sautéing more veggies than we needed for our dinners created leftovers that will keep longer than raw veggies.

What’s the plan? We’d already planned the kebabs before we saw our new veggies. On Wednesday night, we planned Thursday’s and Friday’s dinners and the Salmon Limone . . . but meal planning for the rest of the week kind of worked out as we went along. I did make a list of the veggies before putting them away so that I could see at a glance what we needed to use.

We still had two cucumbers and some potatoes, so on the Wednesday when we got our next CSA box, our dinner side dishes were mashed potatoes and cucumbers with lemon sour cream (left over from Salmon Limone), with the main dish of soy-free veggie burgers from Trader Joe’s.

What’s your approach to an abundance of vegetables?

Source: https://www.kitchenstewardship.com/csa-meal-planning-tips/