Tonight's Dinner: January 13, 2013

Today was quite the productive day.  Well, it was my kind of productive Sunday.  I was able to sleep in until 10:15am before receiving a text about going to pho for lunch.  After having a giant bowl of noodles, I hopped next door to do all of my grocery shopping and then up to the range to watch a round of Nick's shooting match.  Once I got home, Emmy and I went for a leisurely walk and then I tackled putting away my laundry.  I actually didn't have that much, but I hate putting away laundry.  It has been sitting in the laundry bag for over a week in the corner of our room.  With House Hunters on the TV in the bedroom, I was feeling bold and decided to switch out my summer clothes for the winter stack.  I had half way gotten through it a few weeks ago and put out my long sleeve t-shirts, but hadn't put away all the shorts and tank tops.  After managing to get through that, I put together a shoe rack that I bought months and months ago and organized my shoes.  I've been meaning to do it for a long time, but have just been busy or lazy.  When we have super busy weekends I just don't want to do anything around the house when I do have a free day. I'm glad that is finally done.  I was also able to go through a stack of shirts for donations.

The top of my closet is now neatly organized.  These are just my heels.  The
flats are in the hall closet on individual hooks.  I highly enjoy how I can look
to the other end of the closet and it's like a tunnel of shoes.  

This looks like it should  be in Pam from The Office's closet.
I had all these hanging in my blouse section, but haven't
touched them since college.  The worst part is that after putting
them all in the donation bag, my closet didn't look like I was
missing any clothes. 

After reorganizing my closet, I was able to plop on the sofa to watch a marathon of Wicked Tuna before starting on dinner.  It was pretty relaxing.  Dinner was even super easy.  I made a braised lamb shank with tortellini, which meant once it was all in the pot I had time to relax more.

The beginning of the browning process.

Aren't these the most gigantic carrots you've ever seen?  Bugs Bunny would
be in heaven.

I had a ton of thyme left from NYE dinner that really needed
to be used before it went bad.  All of my thyme died once it
got really cold so I was forced to buy it.  This has to be half
a box of thyme wrapped with a couple of sprigs of rosemary.
(Rosemary is still alive despite the cold.)  I wrapped it in cheese
cloth because I was being lazy and didn't want to pull it off the
soft twigs.  I threw the whole satchel in the pot. 

Once the meat was done braising, I threw in the tortellini.  Because we wanted
the sauce to be thicker, I used cornstarch mixed with the broth to thicken it up.
Normally, I would have made a roux, but again, I was being lazy.  

While the lamb was braising I made giant chocolate chip
cookies for Nick and his office.