The dinosaur whisperer

Operation: Eat Real Food Again is going pretty well. Turns out my blood sugar does not run wild at the first sign of food that doesn't taste like wallpaper paste (just used wallpaper paste for the first time a couple of weeks ago, I know what I'm talking about). This is fortunate, since my food-fantasy daydreams (That's a thing, right? Totally normal.) had gotten pretty pitiful. Like...small, unadorned bowls of multigrain cereal pitiful.

Anyway, I really mangled this Jacques Pepin recipe for stuffed pork tenderloin, but it still tasted like food intended for humans, so it was a winner.

Even very small portions of any Homesick Texan recipe are worthwhile, this King Ranch chicken casserole (slightly fancy-pants version) included.

Seriously, four bites of this with a huge spinach salad is so much better than Sadness Burritos.

I went to the Bon Appétit recipe clipping vault for this pasta carbonara, and then I smiled for like an hour, because: pasta.

This is as close as I'm going to get to a bowl of ice cream until about 2012.

Saturday was Austin Museum Day, so we went to the Children's Museum to take advantage of the lack of admission and presence of dinosaurs. Anna loves dinosaurs, so naturally I was prepared for her to find this experience miserable, or at least exceedingly tedious. But it wasn't so bad this time around!

First, communication:

"Talk to me, small dinosaur. Tell me your secrets."

Then, domination:

"You are mine now. This way, to the tunnel slide."

Of course, she wasn't really happy until she found something to line up.

After the chaos of the dinosaurs, she needed about half an hour of ORDER.