My days have been odd lately and I don’t know why. Well, I do know why, I’m just not sure what reason my head decided to latch onto to then cause out of proportion stress without warning me or giving me a hint as to how to settle it back down. For those of you who know me, this comes as no surprise, but I get bouts of depression from time to time. I have since I was little. I was the youngest person my psychiatrist ever put on meds. Yay me.

As I said, my days have been interesting the past few weeks. I’m fine during the day, but most days I “crash” in the late afternoon or evening and no longer want to do anything at all except curl up in a ball or stare at the wall. I can’t even nap because my head throws nightmares at me before I can manage to fall asleep. If I do fall asleep, it just means the nightmares will probably be bad enough to wake me back up in a heart-pounding terror. So, no naps. But I still need to cook dinner Monday through Thursday. So, I decided that I should pull out our trusty slow cooker, since I can set up dinner early enough in the day that my brain hasn’t done a nose dive and started telling me all of my faults, flaws, and failures yet.

It has worked pretty good these past few weeks. I cooked a nice sort of Shepherd’s Pie with chicken, and a peach bread pudding for dessert: (This one wasn’t in the slow cooker, it just took a long time in the oven)

And a mushroom chicken recipe that is definitely a keeper. It was supposed to use white meat, but I found the dark meat to be fall-apart tender and almost buttery:

I also tried out a new seasoning mix that our housemate Kelly brought home a while back. It is “Middle Eastern Inspired ZA’ATAR Blend. I even made (cheater) Naan to go with it (I say cheater because I found a recipe that didn’t need yeast and a rise). It has a pleasant but not overpowering flavor. Next time I should do a curry or something to go on the rice and give the Naan something to sop up.

Not bad for a week where I’ve only been fully functional for 2/3 of each day. I am hopeful that I will be able to get my head around the stressful things going on for me right now (which shouldn’t be all that stressful, really) and get back to letting me be fully functional all day. Hopefully by the weekend one (or maybe even two!) of them should be dealt with, so that would be good. Fingers crossed.

So, that’s where I’ve been the past few weeks. Sorry I haven’t kept up on the blog. I hope to be back to it from now on.