I am full of blogging fever!

Maybe the Julie & Julia book has renewed my blogging or the fact that it's another crappy weekend day and I am forced to be inside and can't stand the thought of wasting away in front of the TV again, or maybe it's because I have so much to say that I am blogging so much today.
So far my day has been - reading a bit more of Julie & Julia, making a crock-pot Hungarian goulash which is filling the house with the most delectable smells, filling in more of my wedding scrapbook that my sister, Amy gave to me and finishing up the Thank You cards for wedding gifts.

If you've never had Hungarian Goulash you are missing out. The recipe varies from cookbook to cookbook but the overall premise is the same. I was at the ghetto Safeway yesterday (read: Jason's sister works there and swears they have a rat problem) and I saw a big ol' package of beef stew beef on sale for $9 for 2.8 pounds of meat. At the time I had no idea what I would do with it but I figured I would make beef stew with red-skinned potatoes in the crock pot. But today when I got out my Fix-It and Forget It 5-Ingredient Favorites crock pot cookbook I saw that I had written in the cover the recipe I had found for goulash.

After a call to my parents for some consulting - "Can I add potatoes; and the recipe calls for 2 pounds of beef but I have 2.8, should I add it all in now or saw off half this hunk of meat and freeze it?" And started cooking it. It's a very easy process, you cut the meat into pieces, in this instance I added potatoes, so I cut them into small pieces and cut a whole yellow onion and added 3 cloves of garlic of varying sizes. Then I mixed together ketchup, worceshire sauce, dry mustard, paprika (a must have along with garlic for almost all of my cooking and all Hungarian cooking), salt and brown sugar. I added this all to the crock pot, mixed it together and set it to cook for 9 hours. Being that I started this process at 1 PM my dinner won't be ready until 10 or 11 PM so my plan is to make Chicken Marsala for dinner and have the goulash for tomorrow's night dinner. I have to cook this chicken, it's been defrosting in the fridge for days now and will go bad if I don't do anything with it and I noticed the mushrooms I bought the other day have a small hole in the plastic covering the container which means they will go bad soon, too.