The little things

Last night, after a particularly awful day at work, Dan drove downtown to pick me up and drive me home so I wouldn't have to take the train. He babied me as only he can and let me spend the ride home whining about my horrible day. When we were getting off the expressway he asked what I wanted for dinner, and knowing we had a TON of leftover ground beef in our fridge from an impromptu BBQ party over the weekend, we decided to try making meatballs - a new cooking encounter for me.

Knowing that I likely already had a recipe saved from ages ago I checked my bookmarks, and sure enough I had Noble Pig's "Best Meatballs" tagged and ready to go. (We obviously didn't have the time for her 3-day marinara sauce, but I was more in the mood for just dumping a jar of sauce into a pan to heat anyways.) It's always thrilling to me to make a new recipe and realize that I have every single ingredient I need in my fridge or pantry already. Even better - we're notorious for wasting leftovers, so it was great to use up the ground beef so quickly, and even halving the recipe left us with 3 freezer bags of meatballs for quick dinners in the future.

As I read off the ingredients list and Dan measured out all the spices I started to feel better. As we took turns shaping the meatballs and unloading the dishwasher I started to be more calm. By the time we took the pan out of the oven and taste-tested the near perfect recipe I was nearly slaphappy. And as we sat down on the couch together to eat our dinner in front of a movie I realized that this is the kind of stuff that life is all about. It doesn't really matter if I have "the worst day of my life" - I will forever get to come home to Dan, have dinner together, and let things like work go to the back of my mind at least for a little while. And to me, that's the kind of stuff that matters.

A few notes:
1. Don't mind the cell phone picture that clearly doesn't have the most appetizing color in the world. Instead, focus on my aaaaaamazing ikat plates from Target that I somehow talked Dan into.
2. The meatballs were a little heavy on the parsley flavor for me, as we used dried instead of fresh. I think it's time to get my little herb garden going again... if it would ever stay above 40 degrees for more than a day at a time around here.
3. Apologies for the general sappiness of this post, but Dan really is wonderful to me and with Easter Sunday marking just 5 months to go (!!!!) until our wedding, I was feeling particularly emotional over the last few days.