So...whats for dinner?

I started to answer, but saw that Goldie already answered.....

I doubt Special would be using a swamp cooler! :-)

Definitely no swamp cooler in FL! I grew up with one in Los Angeles though - in the house my parents built in 1959. After I left for college they put in central AC. They had a typical mid-mod house with no ceiling space for ducts so it was a project. The next-door neighbor - one of the only originals still living on the cul-de-sac - still doesn't have AC! They could use the ductless Mitsubishi type, it would be so much easier - but they are kind of unattractive up on the wall... The solar panel salespeople call me every week, and come knock on the door periodically. With way my house is positioned on the property and the roof shape there is nowhere to place the panels that I won't see them, I live on a corner lot and the house is L-shaped. I have been unwilling, so far, to mess with the aesthetic, but DH will retire next year and we will have to see how the funds shake out - it would be nice not to have an electric bill. We run AC more than six months out of the year and my solution has been to use the electric company budget plan that makes the bill the same amount each month instead of low bills in the winter and sky high ones in the summer.

Dinner tonight may be a pork tenderloin with sweet potatoes, and probably roasted broccoli so I can do a sheet pan dinner.

My singing partner & his wife live along a creek on the outskirts of Madison, WI. His BIL is a contractor and installed solar panels on the roof and a mini-turbine in the yard. They, too, pay no electric bills and sell their excess energy back to the power company. But in those cold WI winters they have a small gas furnace because they wouldn't be able to generate enough electricity to both power & heat their home.

Tonight Bob went to a drug co. talk (about Jardiance) at Ditka's steakhouse--and brought back a boneless NY strip dinner (as well as his own leftover steak). There were several no-shows, so all the doctors got to bring home dinners if they wanted to. It came with mashed potatoes & green beans, so I had just the veg with 1/3 of the steak. Tomorrow night I will reheat everything, as well as pan-sear some fresh NJ bay scallops (smaller than sea, but larger than the tiny Asian scallops most places sell). I'd meant to make some ceviche last night when they were fresh (flown in that morning) but I didn't have any jalapeños or serranos and didn't feel like doing it just for myself, so I grilled a grass-fed kosher hot dog on a keto bun with sauerkraut, along with four shishito peppers--all of which turned out to be quite hot. (Only 1 in 10 is supposed to have heat). I will also reheat some more green beans & Brussels sprouts from Whole Foods, as well as make a tomato-basil salad (plenty of protein so no need for mozzarella) from one of my nice ripe homegrown Big Boy beefsteaks. For brunch tomorrow, make guac from half an avocado that needs mashing, and put it on low-carb toast topped with an egg.

I've settled into a 16/8 intermittent fast pattern, no carb-cheating, but no results either. At least I've stopped regaining, though. Maybe that's the best I can hope for.

Good grilling & patio eating weather through Sat. night. Flip side is that we need to water the lawn & plants daily.

Sandy, not gaining IS a result and congrats to you on the progress and finding a "groove' that works for you. I am also sort of not gaining but not losing, either. With fishing season, our meal plans are all over the map. I sometimes bring a large snack to the beach and skip dinner if fishing is in the evening. It is frustrating, I know; for me as well.

Made nachos last night. Tonight will be some sort of vegetarian Indian dish. I have cauliflower to use up.

Arizona also has some tax incentives for solar. Since I can do most of that kind of work myself, the total cost would be quite a bit lower than a "professionally installed" system.

Last night I baked another whole chicken. I'm slowly getting close to the "good as is" category for brining a chicken. Fortunately the chicken prices are coming back down. For awhile they were high enough that I wasn't bothering to buy any until the red "manager's special -- 1/2 off" stickers appeared on the package. It only gave me a day to cook them, but that was OK.

I must have not refreshed the display of this thread before I posted. To put the house on solar here, I would either need to do a lot of gas and vent line plumbing (the stove, water heater and clothes dryer are electric) and replace some very new appliances or do a hybrid system where the "big stuff" stays on grid while the rest of the stuff goes to solar. Around here, if we hung clothes up on the line, everything would be rust colored.

My initial goal is to get the well pump, some lighting and the refrigerator onto something more reliable than the utility power......

This isn't much different than when I grew up. Back then, we were always having power outages...but most happened on payday night when power poles would jump out in front of unsuspecting marines driving home from the bar/tavern.

The story behind the above....I was in the car with my dad and we saw a car crash into a power pole. Dad stopped and he, using the tone of voice developed over 30 years in the marines, told the person (a young marine) to stay in the car until the power lines had been pulled off of his car. The young marine, in a not quite completely sober voice, "Sir. I don't know what happened. It just jumped out in front of me."

Our cost for the solar panels was $5000. The remainder was covered by the state incentive and the federal tax write off. Always the skeptic, I wasn't in favor. Always open to innovation, dh persuaded me. He checks the operation of the panels with an app on his phone. Recently he contacted the installation company Sunpro that one panel wasn't working. They went to our house to repair it and it is now back in operation. I had suspected Sunpro was a "fly by night" company. That was not the case.

The panels are on the south side of the house, visible from the street. Our house was built in the 70's and doesn't compare to the million dollar plus homes in a nearby subdivision. We updated the interior when we bought the house 35 years ago.

DH also checks the temperature in the house to make sure the a/c is working. I'm always careful to change the battery in the thermostat before we depart, a lesson learned when we came home to an un-air-conditioned house one October.

On topic, we had pasta last night. I used the bag of fettucini in the freezer and a jar of Paul Newman's garlic marinara and a package of sweet Italian sausage. The combination was delicious. So was the tossed salad. Rao's has become so popular that Walmart's didn't have any on the shelf that day I bought the Newman's.

Tonight's dinner is a blank.

Wally, I admire your variety of meals.

Carole, thank you for the compliment. I have always liked "ethnic" food (in quotes because it is only ethnic in america, LOL) and when I practiced dietetics, I always studied up on different foods/ingredients so anything a patient was interested in, I could speak intelligently to. I also watch(ed) a BUTT-load of TV cooking shows. I'm fortunate DH is willing to try anything (not so very early in the marriage) so I feel less stressed about a ruined meal here or there.

Special, your Airbnb cooking plan reminds me of when we motorcycled across the country and never knew where we'd end up, so making meals in the motel room or campgrounds became a sort of game for me. Thank god for microwaves, LOL. There's also a cookbook solely for microwave cooking but it sounds like you will have access to a real house-setting.

Leftover Indian tonight. I may toss in a cup of green peas to last night's mix just to make it a little different.

Wow. Huge thunderstorm. The weather radar color code shows we are in the "purple" area. Purple is the heaviest rain. In 15 minutes we've had 0.58 inches of rain.

Boy do I miss our local WI custard stands. And YUM on fresh tomatoes and raw tuna. Drool. I read an interesting article on glycemic index a year or so back, when I was super low-carbing. One study pointed to a woman who followed low carb to the letter but could not lose weight or get into ketosis. It turned out that tomatoes, of all things, which are considered low carb, spiked her insulin/sugars through the roof. Mystery solved in her case. I wonder how many of us have a food that doesn't play by the rules inside our bodies.

We have also had guiltily-good weather; a little something for everyone. No 90s this year (so far! it is still august!!) and only 4 or so days in the 82s. Seattle, on the other hand, may hit 90 again next week. That will break their record for 90s in a year. And we had the mother of all thunderstorms last week. Almost like a real mid-west summer storm. Lightening, thunder, pouring rain. So rare out here. Lightening did not help the dry, dry areas at all. It only lasted 1/2 hour, but what a memory-trigger.

I hope all those in the monsoon areas will be safe.

I have boneless skinless chicken thighs and all this talk of Chinese food has made me decide to make 3-cup-chicken. Easy and quick. I'll probably serve it with sweet potato, instead of rice, and cauliflower.

minus - looks like rain coming your way, right? Creamy orzo with assorted veggies sounds like a good storm riding out dish. DH is over at DD's house putting up a new side of the fence (with her beau helping - yay that I don't have to!) that blew down mid-week, last week, in a storm here. It was the only part of the whole fence not replaced since we bought that house and it was pretty dilapidated. We had planned to replace it when the weather cooled off, but mother nature handled the demo for us. Fortunately the chickens had enough sense to stay in the yard but DD saw this happen on the security camera and was worried all the way home from work that she would have to try to find them, but they were all there. She has some new young chickens that haven't spent much time outside of the coop, so they did a good job!

Tonight is finally the pork tenderloin and sweet potatoes, which I didn't thaw until today, and creamed spinach - DH brought his lunch home yesterday and ate it for dinner and I had a salad.

Sorry, but it's bad enough I have to give up sugar and starch and restrict the "window" of time I can eat. When I hear stuff like "if you're plateauing, give up tomatoes (red bell peppers, broccoli, etc.)" that the Hellers (who wrote those infamous late-'90s Carb Addicts Diet books) sanctimoniously advised, I wanna scream. Enough with feeling like Cinderalla terrified of her coach turning into a pumpkin come midnight. I am tempted to just say the hell with it and eat "intuitively:" what I want within reason and not eating when I'm not hungry. This business of "my 8-hour window is closing, so I'd better get that last bite in before it's too late" is beyond infuriating. (And Dr. Stephen Gundry, with his cockamamie demonization of "lectins," is at the head of my s**t list).

I just read an article in the "The Receipt" food-spending column in online version of Bon Appetit on how a 27-year-old in DC can dine out every night (not to mention trendy cocktail-bar-hopping) on a mere $225K a year (her job was very vaguely described but didn't seem to involve much actual work unless she left out a lot of details).. She doesn't cook, because she grew up with her parents serving pasta most nights. Poor baby--resorting to having her parents pay for her cellphone on their family plan and her friends including her in their family streaming plans so she can pay for her exclusive private club membership and $3100/mo. mortgage. (She has no student loan debt because her folks paid her tuition). Most of the places she & her boyfriend dine are upscale and some even Michelin-starred. Her average weekly dinner tab is >$600-700 (some meals >$400) but her groceries about $35 (mostly massive quantities of berries for snacking from farmers' markets plus $16/lb. coffee beans). She orders five entrees at a time and never brings home leftovers--the only leftovers she eats are from expensive pastries she buys during the day. She uses a $1300 Breville espresso machine with all the bells & whistles to make just Americanos (espresso plus hot water). And I thought our eating & spending habits are extravagant! But for her thrice-weekly early morning squash games, she'd be well on her way to "diabesity." After all those cocktail hours, I'd hate to see her liver enzymes 20 years from now. (When I was 27 we lived in a $100/mo furnished 1BR student housing apt. in Seattle--and got sticker shock when we moved here and had to pay more than twice that for just the four walls).

Didn't eat much today--two sugar-free milk chocolate candies and a handful of nuts at the close of my 8-hr "window" last night, plus more veg. than usual at brunch & dinner, had unwelcome digestive consequences, albeit temporary. Since I didn't even eat today till after 4pm (an egg and a small chunk of steak after we got home from the Immersive Monet exhibit), I was able to wait till after 9 for dinner (ordered out from Suol & Smoke for BBQ--one large sparerib, half a baked sweet potato, 1/2 c. of collard greens and a couple of cherry tomatoes; dessert was a handful of assorted berries).

Special - no rain today. Unlikely tonight at 20%. Maybe tomorrow at 40% - but still unlikely. Sigh. Really good luck that the chickens "didn't cross the road". Love both you & Cyathea cooking pork.

The creamy orzo: cooked in chicken broth & heavy cream with garlic & mushrooms & asparagus - and then shrimp on the top. Even with my notation from last time I made it with spinach to add more garlic, it was pretty bland. Looks like orzo isn't fated to be my favorite pasta - or even a go to pasta.

Dinner last night was home made chicken soup made by our hosts. Sharon and I went to Flagstaff, AZ so Sharon could jam (music) with the folks she used to play with on a twice weekly basis.

After everyone had their fill of soup, the leftovers went to Frankie (our dog). At first he wasn't sure of it, but after one "slurp" he enthusiastically devoured the remaining soup. :-)

Here goes a repeat of a post that disappeared into lost posts dimension. Last night's dinner wasn't pizza. I thawed three fresh brats, 2 cheddar and 1 cheddar and jalapeno. I simmered them in beer and then browned them in the skillet when the liquid was gone. Side was a delicious composed salad of tomato, cucumber, avocado, blue cheese and sweet onion on dh's.

Tonight is meatloaf Monday at Clancy's. I'm looking forward to another grilled cheese brisket sandwich unless I change my mind and have broasted chicken.