How is Summer Already Almost Over?!?

Yeah, so I took a week off from writing my blog for a number of reasons, not the least of which is how freaking busy we have been lately.  It feels like we go from appointment to appointment for the kids with very few "just for fun" activities in between.  I mean, we started this summer off weird - a kid in the hospital for two and a half days definitely qualifies as weird - then we have had all other kinds of stuff, which has led to me blinking and finding that we are smack dab in the middle of July!  Ah, well...c'est la vie (or however that is spelled in French).  "That's life", is all I am trying to say. 

Our life today includes numerous play dates during the day and then a tae kwon do class for my younger daughter, happening right at dinner time.  This happens on Tuesdays and on Thursdays and is not my favorite schedule, but it has forced me to break out the crock pot for multiple dinners this summer.  What I am finding with the crock pot, is that the dinners are either very, very good or very, very bad.  There are not many recipes which fall in between those two designations and I am hoping that my concoction today will fall squarely into the good category.  I made meatballs and sauce, which are currently (hopefully) simmering away, to be ready to serve when we all get home for dinner later this evening. 

For the meatballs, I used about a pound of ground sirloin and about a pound of pork loin chops (sliced thinly), which I ground (or chopped up) in my food processor.  I added about four heels of whole wheat bread (ground into bread crumbs), a few leftover vegetables, pureed, from one of my very, very bad slow cooker experiments last week (damn you again, Pinterest!), plus about a half of a cup of grated Parmesan cheese.  I started off by making the meatballs and browning them, but then I got lazy and dumped most of them into the sauce (a mixture of pre-made marinara and seasoned, crushed tomatoes) completely raw.  I cranked it to "high" and plan to let it cook for a little over 6 hours.  I sure hope it cooks through....

The very, very bad slow cooker (referenced above) was a chicken and vegetable recipe that I found on Pinterest and followed (to the letter!) and it was not cooked through when it was supposed to be.  In order to serve dinner before 10 pm that night, I had to pour everything into a skillet and saute the food that was supposed to be cooked by the damn crock pot.  Dishes....dishes...dishes, everywhere!  I twitch a little when I think about it - if there is one thing I hate, it is using dishes unnecessarily.  (I am going to have to blame that little quirk of my cooking personality on my cooking school days.)

Anyway, we will see how this one turns out...primarily because I will have no one to blame but myself if it is terrible.  ("Terrible" is likely to equal "still raw and harboring potential pathogens at the dinner time hour".)  Fingers crossed that all I (or my husband) have to do to get dinner on the table tonight after TKD is cook some pasta....or, I guess, in the Terrible case scenario, call for pizza.