Helloooooooooo, and happy glorious long Memorial Day weekend!!

I have had quite the eventful week … of not working. I had to have a magnificently unpleasant medical procedure on Tuesday, so, in preparation for that, my Monday looked like this:

Following the magnificently unpleasant medical procedure (from which everything checked out quite healthily), I ate many many salads to reintroduce my body to solid food. I don’t have any pictures because they were on my old computer, and I wasn’t excited enough about them to transfer them to my new computer.

That’s right, my new computer!!

I have been working with the same ibook G4 since 2004 when my four “parents” got it for me as a college graduation present. It has served me loyally, but six years is a long time in laptop world. The poor thing lost the ability to hold a charge (or even be charged), not to mention that nearly everything stopped functioning because the operating system was too old to handle application upgrades. The G4 conveniently saw me right through to the end of grad school, when the four “parents” came through once again with a brand new MacBook as a graduation present 😀

Speaking of which, I officially graduated from Bank Street with my Master of Education degree on Thursday! I had a dazzling cheering section with mom and John:

And Erik:

Next Thursday is the Social Work graduation, and then I will be free!!! Except for a summer full of studying for the social work licensing exam … FUUUUUN.

In the meantime, I got inspired by Gena’s post about tomato tahini dressing. I had conveniently just made my own tahini a few days earlier by whirring home-toasted sesame seeds, olive oil, and coarse sea salt in my Nut & Spice grinder. After reading Gena’s post, I trotted over to Union Market and picked up a few sun-dried tomatoes in olive oil:

I threw the tahini and the tomatoes back in the grinder with a bit of white wine vinegar and came out with this beautiful (to me) paste:

I’ve been crumbling it on my arugula salads and spending a big chunk of time in salad heaven ever since 😀

In my second bout with food fun at home, Erik had exhausted his lunch supply mid-week, and I realized we had peanut butter and jelly … but no bread! Never fear! I dusted the ice off the rest of my pack of Pepperidge Farm Puff Pastry (the first half of the back went to calzones) and uncovered this guava jam that arrived months and months ago (or perhaps even a year ago) for review:

I rolled the dough out into a bunch of funkily-shaped squares and slathered on the goods:

Sealed with a fork:

Baked for 20 minutes at 375 until crispy and oozy:

I sampled a baby one:

OoooooooooooooMmmmmmmmmmmmGggggggggggg delicious!

Melty peanut butter, be still my heart.

So, now I am going to go back to planning my staycation itinerary for the rest of the weekend. I think it will be brilliant. If I am so inspired, I might even take pictures!

Enjoy the sun!