I successfully ignored my kitchen for... well. Quite some time.

Part of it was the mini-vacation to Ohio, during which I ignored anything like health and good taste. Seriously--there's nothing to eat on road trips. Once you get beyond where Sheetz and WaWa are every hundred miles or so on the highway, there's nothing left but fast food. Which, arguably, is not food at all.

So I returned home to a filthy kitchen. I don't generally like to leave my place a mess when I leave for a few days--travel is tiring enough without coming back to a kitchen that looks like the Great Powdered Sugar Blizzard of '08 had blown through--but, well, it was Christmas. I hadn't had time to do anything but bake, visit family, bake more, visit more family, do last-minute laundry, pack, sleep, cram the cat into a carrier and leave smoking treadmarks behind me.

I came home, as I said, to a thick layer of powdered sugar, nuts and calcified God-knows-what.

It's better now. Three weeks later, I'd sure hope so.

And now--just to make things more interesting--I need to severely restrict saturated fat in the things I cook. That means the tacos I made last night? The ones with no cheese? Nasty.

You can't mess up potato wedges, though, and those will make an appearance here very, very soon. As in, next week.

So will the sweet-and-spicy chicken with peppers and onions that I'm fixing for dinner tomorrow night.

So is a heavier focus on lunch, because my schedule for the spring has me working or in class at dinnertime most nights.

Sigh. I wish I'd taken pictures of the greasy, deliciously dive fare sausage I had while on vacation. I just, y'know, didn't want to start snapping photos in the middle of a nearly empty dive bar. But trust me, it left a puddle and tasted like the most wonderful heart attack you could ever have.