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.