Dumb Kitchen Tricks

Whether I am accomplished in the kitchen is debatable, but the fact is (facts are?) that I do cook and bake a lot, enjoy it, the stuff I fix gets eaten, and I am not aware of anyone who has died or gotten grievously ill from eating my food.

Sometimes, though, I perform some real dumb stunts.

Take last night, for instance. It has been my Thanksgiving task, for well over 20 years to make the pies. The number of people sharing Thanksgiving with us seems to grow yearly so last night I made 7 pies. But I made pie crusts for 12 because I misread the pie crust recipe I know by heart and have been making for a couple dozen years. Instead of using the 1/2 cup of butter called for, I unwittingly freestyled it and used 1/2 stick. Through force of will, body heat and cursing I managed to get all 7 crusts rolled out and baked two of them. Then, I decided that some of the crusts were too awful to bake and re-did the recipe--funny how it turned out PERFECTLY when I actually followed the recipe. Soooooo, I re-made the crusts for the rest of the pies. All is now well in pie-world.

Then, there was this morning. Thanksgiving cooking responsibilities performed, I decided to make potato soup to have over the weekend, an easy enough task. The sausage was cooked, cooled and placed in a baggie in the fridge--same with the bacon. Potatoes and onions diced and cooked. I grabbed the baggie when it was time to put the sausage in the pot. The sausage plopped into the pot in a strange way--I didn't remember it being that clumpy. It wasn't. In fact the sausage was still safely in the fridge but a bag of dates had been put into the soup. Fortunately they were whole dates but the little devils dove right to the bottom of the pot. I think I fished them all out. If not we'll have a new tradition, whoever finds the date in their soup will get to make the next pot. Or, something like that.

Blessings to All--Have a Happy Thanksgiving.

Bohus Stickning

I just spent a day learning about the Bohus Stickning knitting technique. That is a style of color work knitting that originated in Sweden during the depression. The hand knitting was performed by women to enable them to make money handknitting for high fashion.















The garments displayed were stunning. The workshop included yarn and instruction to make a set of wrist warmers. I'll photograph them when I get them done.

Kelly (aka Tim-the-Tool man) got a new toy today.
The difference between men and boys is . . .
the price of their toys.

I am a WINNER!!!!!!

I entered a contest on The Pioneer Woman blog and won this/these.

I think the contest was a drawing, and I was just lucky. To enter you had to identify your favorite TV chef, food blog, or cookbook author. This is what I said:

Winner 1: #40 Annie. “BOBBIE FLAY. He is the only person on planet earth who I would even consider leaving my husband for, and I think my husband would encourage me to go.”

So, it's early Christmas for me. I hope the cookware arrives before Thanksgiving.

He's better than I am

So, I got up early on Saturday in a cleaning frenzy. You know, the kind where you move all the furniture out and run a wet rag around the bottom of the base boards to get that linty junk that builds up. The kind of frenzy where you take 45 minutes to vacuum the family room, cause you want to get the floor really clean, and where you mop the floor with boiling water, cause . . .

anything worth doing is worth OVERDOING.
Well, since that kind of frenzy can go too far, I limited my efforts, deciding I'd quit at about 11.

When we sat down for lunch, it became apparent that someone -- KELLY (!)-- had tracked dog crap ALL OVER the family room and kitchen floors. DAMN IT!!!!!!!!! I groused a bit about this happenstance (as you can imagine) and Kelly good naturedly cleaned up his mess (although not as thoroughly as I would have, I might even have said that).

Then we decided to work the bees. So it was in-and-out-and-in-and-out of the back yard. Well, there was lots more dog crap to be had on the shoes, especially mine. When we , and me with my dog-shitty shoes, got into Kelly's (always immaculate) car later in the day, you know what he did ????

He laughed.
And offered to take my shoes to a car wash.


I am NEVER that nice.