Yesterday was just a day, you know?  Nothing huge happened, but it was good.  It’s easy to overlook “good” days in search of elusive awesome days, so in an effort to do that, I’ll tell you about the good.

I met with a print shop owner in the morning, and after looking at paper options and meeting some of the shop employees, I’m glad to say that I’ve found a solution for the notecard situation.  Before long, I’ll have real products to sell in my almost set up Etsy shop.  A few other print shops left me feeling dejected after conversations about my (small) order size and the need to scan in watercolor originals to make the prints.  But not this shop.  Winner winner, turkey dinner!

Which brings us to dinner.  Mmm.  We had sausage with okra and cherry tomatoes and grilled zucchini with buttermilk-basil dressing (you can find that recipe here, thanks to Martha Stewart–it’s an easy one, I promise).  The main dish recipe is from Real Simple, but I think it’s only available in their most recent magazine.

All together, it looked like this:

Oops, I forgot the buttermilk-basil dressing.

And that brings me to my last point for now.  I’ve been thinking about starting a dinner diary.  I’m currently reading Dinner: A Love Story (blog here).  It’s wonderful.  It has stories of families who struggle to cook right and families who sacrifice a little bit every day to make that family time happen.

Why are both of those stories important in a collection of recipes?  Well, the book clearly isn’t trying to make me feel guilty about my level of culinary skill.  It doesn’t talk down to me.  It isn’t saying that I have to get things right all the time.  It’s just trying to help me figure out how to properly plan for and enjoy a tradition of dinner with the friends and family who a daily part of my life.

One of the main ideas in the book is that it’s helpful to keep a record of what you will cook each week.  I’m only 30 pages into the book, so don’t take my word for it.  But I think the idea is that you can use your lists for planning, which helps you get started on the tradition of family dinner.  And once those dinners are in the past, you can use the lists as a record to remind you where you started cooking-wise and remember good recipes and happy meals.  I like that idea.

I’ve come a long way from my grad school idea that Hot Pockets are an acceptable meal for any occasion, and I wish I had recorded some of the meals that have been a part of that transition in the past six years.  It’s just a simple line a day, so why not?  It’s practical and sentimental combined, which is definitely my kind of idea.