I can’t believe I cooked dinner the night before Thanksgiving

This evening I feel lucky to be at home in my warm, dry house. It’s been a wintry couple of days, and this afternoon it began to rain/sleet like crazy just as we left work.  The temperature hovered around freezing all the way home, and the road began to feel slippery.  When we pulled into the valley, the mailbox was frozen shut, and the deck was coated in ice.  Since we’ve arrived, the temperature has climbed a bit, but now it seems to be snowing.  Yuck.  So although we wanted to get a head start on tomorrow, we also wanted a hot dinner.

We still have so much fresh produce from our Chicago trip over a week ago….. except it isn’t getting any fresher.  This evening I used an eggplant, zucchini, tomato, onion, some garlic, basil (in the freezer from summer garden) and tempeh to make something really delicious.  The idea was to have it over rice, which I thought I had leftover from the weekend.  Turns out it was mashed potatoes in that container, also from the weekend.  So we had it on mashed potatoes.  Oh, those hot peppers aren’t so hot anymore.  I thought when they dried they’d be hotter….. but no.

Normally I like to be the one with camera in hand during school, but yesterday my student teacher was taking the photos.  I was talking about ocean currents, and why they flow in a circular pattern.  There was another one of me holding a record, which we put on an actual turntable and rolled a marble across to demonstrate the Coriolis Effect, but then of course we had to play the record because it was sooooooo cooooool.  You’d think they’d never seen a record before!  (Well, for some of them, it’s true.)  In that photo my eyes were closed, though; in this one I at least look engaged.