Well, that sucked.

I brought up the idea of moving when I was talking with my Hub on Friday. We fought about it for pretty much the whole weekend. Oy.

I don't know if it's a failure on my part to beat it into his head or a failure on his part to pick up on it, but until I sat down with him this weekend and spread out the whole financial situation, he just didn't get it. He hadn't grasped that the reason I'd cut back our grocery budget was to be able to afford the new life insurance, or that part of the reason I'd become a vegetarian was to make that new grocery budget possible. The funny thing is that he then trotted all these things back out when he was trying to convince me that we had plenty of money, after all we were saving money on food...

It was kind of funny to see the lightbulb go on over his head, but I honestly wish he'd put two and two together before that moment, because it would have saved us two full days of aggrivation. I could have sworn that I told him was was going on at the time, but either he forgot or I was trying to keep a cheerful face on things just a leeeeettle too much.

So, the apartment hunt is on. It'll be the first time we've moved, besides moving in with each other, so this will be interesting, to say the least.

In other news, my Hub came up with a "beef stew" recipe last night that uses portabella mushrooms in place of the beef, and oh, my, it's good.

First he took about a pound of portabella caps and cut them up into aprox. 1-inch-square pieces. Threw in a tablespoon of butter (yeah, yeah, I know, but it's for flavor) and a tablespoon of olive oil (lowering the smoke point) into our stock pot over medium-high heat, let the butter melt, and then threw in the mushrooms to let them get all brown and lovely. He chopped five cloves of garlic and one large onion, and threw those in, too. Once everything was getting a bit translucent, he threw in two cups of stock (veggie, in this case, but use chicken or beef as is your preference), 1 1/4 cups of red wine, a 28-oz can of chopped tomatoes, some rosemary (about 1/2 tsp) and thyme (about 1/2 tsp), and salted that bad boy up. Let that simmer for about ten minutes, and then tossed in about 1.5 lbs of potatoes (in this case, fingerling potatoes that were chopped up into bite-sized pieces) and a bunch of Lacinato kale (he says, FYI, that collard greens would work equally well). It simmered with the lid on for another half-hour or so, and voila: stew!

I baked a bunch of small loaves of bread to go with it, and we're set for lunch for the week. Also on the menu: Country-Style Tomato & Potato Stew with Poached Cod. An ingenious recipe because my Hub and I can only eat one fillet of the whitefish we got (which we used instead of cod because, well, ya use what ya got) and it has a "morph" recipe attached that lets you use the leftovers to make stew-- and since we had one whole big fillet left, I just stripped off the skin, broke it into chunks, and used that rather than dig in the freezer for alternative meat or non-meat-product. This has fed us for something like four meals, I swear. It's awesome. Add on a salad and/or some fresh-baked bread, and it's even more awesome.

I currently have bread-starter sitting on my kitchen counter. This may be a bad idea. Dunno. If anything blows up, I may have my answer. Alton Brown has yet to lead me wrong, but I'm not sure about this one.