Messes

Recently we've been on a "try lots of new recipes" kick. Which is awesome, btw. I am falling in love with Our Best Bites for sure. They are where I got my Toffee Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe, our new favorite stuffed pepper recipe, and the delicious mango quinoa salad recipe. Today they posted a recipe for strawberries & chocolate nachos that I REALLY want to try. I have loved everything that I have ever tried from them and really really want to get their cookbook that came out earlier this year (or was it late last year, I don't remember).

I stumbled upon something called a blog-hop giveaway from a bunch of blogs that write book reviews. The whole deal is that there are like 276 blogs that partnered up and each blog is doing a giveaway- either a book (or a few books) or amazon/borders/barnes & noble gift cards. I went through a TON of the websites and entered probably 70 or 80 (or maybe it was closer to 120, I don't know...) of the giveaways and really hope that tomorrow morning I get an email or several saying that I won something! I would absolutely love to win a few of the Amazon gift cards--I would definitely start using them to buy the Our Best Bites cookbook.

I just remembered that the whole reason I sat down to blog wasn't to blog about the giveaways I've entered or how much I love Our Best Bites and want their cookbook. The point was that as we've been trying new recipes I find myself making more of a mess in the kitchen. Turns out that a lot of our recipes before this new part of my life were one pot dinners or maybe two pots and a cutting board... but now it seems like I've always got a cutting board, a knife or two, several pots, mixing bowls, serving bowls (used to just serve things straight out of the pans, but now that the food looks prettier I want to serve it prettier), and then the dishes that we eat out of/with. Not to mention the overwhelming amount of either brownies or ice cream or brownies AND ice cream that we've been eating recently that just adds more dishes. Then.. I find myself not doing the dishes until the next morning. This morning I woke up to find my 12" skillet, my large and medium saucepans, the colander, my huge cutting board and about a bajillion other dishes just sitting on my counter, exactly where I left them last night.

I think I have to start forcing myself to clean up before I go to sleep, it makes me really tired just looking at the mess that I get to clean up today. But it helps knowing that Chris has to work all night and I'm eating leftovers for dinner, so I don't need anything to be cleaned up right away and I also won't make a big mess making my dinner tonight. It's always nice when the kitchen can stay clean for a while.

And those are my feelings about Our Best Bites (which in case you can't tell, I LOVE!), trying new recipes, eating tastier food, and my hatred of doing the dishes.