A meat free Lent, wish us luck. Also Winter

In no way am I a praticing Catholic,  we have discussed this before, but now that Mr. H is going to Catholic school I'm trying to make a supporting effort at home.  Lent starts on Wednesday and I've decided to forgo meat/fish for the 40 days. Since today marks day 15 without alchohol I figure why not be as miserable as possible? 

So no meat starting Wednesday.  Husband hasn't protested this decision but I can tell he's a little alarmed by it. I've assured him that he will still get meat with his dinners. 

It's actually a treat in a way, like sending myself to a vegetable cooking camp.

Here are some things to look forward to:

We had this Jamie Oliver sweet potato/black bean stew last week. It was delicious.  I've been drinking a lot of tonic water with lime at night, no gin.

Wednesday night will be chick pea gyros off Pinterest 

Thursday is Jamie Oliver's eggplant and riccota pasta, *providing* I can locate an eggplant. Both groceries were out of them yesterday although the person I spoke to at Walmart said they would get them in today. I'm curious to try this as I don't particularly care for eggplant. Husband will have chicken added to his pasta.

We had mashed redskin potatoes leftover from Valentine's day dinner so last night I made them into 11 rather large potato and cheddar pierogies.  These are dinner Friday with a salad. Husband will have a bratwurst with his.

My lunches most often look like this:

Some manner of rice/bean/leftovers with an egg on top so that's easy enough. 

Both Mr. H and Mr. A. are embarrassingly picky eaters so they don't even factor into the Lent menu. Mr. H graciously offered to give up "trying new foods" for Lent. I told him it was kind of him to offer, but no.

In other news:

The kids and I painted coffee mugs this week. It was an oven fire paint so now they each have their own special mug.

Mr. H. painted yellow geodes. My mug is ugggly and not worth pictures.

Yesterday was pretty mild, maybe 30 degrees, so we were able to get out in the sunshine.

I actually had my coat off it was so nice.

Look at that sky!

Mr. A. and I found a mess of fun cookie cutters cleaning. We were going to make sugar cookies today but not 10 minutes ago I turned the wrong burner on to make tea, the one I turned on was under the cookie sheet sitting out with the cookie mix, butter and egg on it. So now I've warped the pan, melted a hole in the cookie mix bag, fused hot plastic to the pan and filled the kitchen with smoke. Which, really is a lot to accomplishin a small amount of time. We will have to find something else to do today.