A Good Friday Night

Himself's gumbo preparation is in full swing, I am on my eleventh or twelfth baking sheet of cutout cookies for The Girl's school bake sale (pecan, gingerbread and now sugar), and zydeco music is blasting.  The kitchen is a complete disaster, but that's okay; it smells amazing in here!

Himself has the stovetop and one end of the island, I have the oven and the other end of the island--so far, we are managing to stay out of each other's way while both getting our cooking done.  Good wine, good company, and good smells...this is a soul-feeding evening and for that I am grateful!

I Just Sat Down For The First Time In Two Days

Thursdays suck.  I don't even want to go into the whole schedule for that day because it makes me tired to think about it, but in general:

get kids up and to school
knee rehab (bike)
taekwondo class
errands, errands, errands
get kids from school
kid activity #1
kid activity #2
kid activity #3 (which ends at 7:30-7:45PM)

all in a row, with time somewhere stolen to be home with the dog.  Oh, and in there I have to feed the kids dinner and make something for Himself to eat when he gets home, too.

Enough by itself, but then last night a friend had a holiday get-together at her house that started in the middle of kid activity #3 (Himself very kindly relieved me from kid detail on his way home from work so I could go.)  And I still had to pack lunches for the kids and get my house ready for a construction crew when I got home from her house!  I accepted the party invitation earlier in the week, when I didn't realize how bad Thursday was going to be: I would SO have cancelled yesterday if it wouldn't have been rude.  And you know what?  That party was the best part of my day, and probably my week.

It wasn't a huge fancy deal, either.  The lady who hosted it is a bigwig in the local community, but very nice and involved in absolutely everything related to the boys' school (in a good way.)  It's a lovely group of women who are involved in all that stuff in general, but we are usually so busy with whatever events we are organizing that we don't have time to enjoy the company.  The point of last night was simply to spend quiet time together socializing before the holiday insanity gets too insane!  Wine, low-key food, good conversation, and re-grounding in the friendships that keep us going in the midst of all the stupid stuff we have to deal with every day.  I walked out of there with recharged batteries...funny, I hadn't realized how empty my tanks were until they were filled.  And they were very, very empty.

Got home at 10PM and started on the rest of the day's tasks...primarily, getting the house ready for the influx of workers today.  When we bought this house, there were six different flooring materials on the first floor alone: two kinds of (heinous) linoleum, two kinds of carpet, wood in the front hall, and nasty institutional white tiles in the hall bathroom.  Last year's kitchen renovation took care of the two kinds of linoleum--they were replaced by porcelain tiles that look like slate.  The current job involves tearing up both the hallway wood and the hall bathroom tile and replacing them with the same porcelain tiles that we have in the kitchen and laundry room--to get ready for the demo crew, I had to clear out the bathroom and hall closet and hallway.  My guest room looks like a bomb hit it at the moment, but oh well.

And of course, this couldn't just be a flooring job--I was told this morning that I need a new sink and toilet and I already knew I needed to replace the light fixture, so apparently we are now doing a total gut job on the bathroom as well!  At least it should still be done by the end of next week (please???)  We'll need both an electrician and a plumber to finish the job, too.

Thank God that the friends coming for the Cajun feast tomorrow have good senses of humor and are okay with big chunks of plywood floor and having to use a second floor bathroom!  Never a dull moment around here...    

Warning: Scroogelike Rant Ahead

I have 10 stations pre-set on the radio in my car.  Two of the ten have been playing nothing but Christmas music since several weeks before Thanksgiving--one adult contemporary, the other best-of-the-70s-80s-and-90s type.  A third just started playing Christmas-only this week, this one a country station.  (And the countrified versions of Christmas carols it is playing are really awful, too--just saying.)

Dammit all to hell, it isn't even December yet and a full 30% of my pre-sets are already off limits to me!  Just can't face Christmas music yet.

Bah HUMBUG.

She's Got The Fever

My daughter has just discovered Justin Bieber, God help me.

The video for "Baby" has been in constant play on YouTube for the last two days, much to the disgust of her elder brother.  :)

Power Struggle

Just for something different, we lost power today.  Five or six times, actually, but fortunately only briefly each time.  The electrical grid around us is so old that a breath of wind or a drop of rain takes it down, sad to say: part and parcel of living out in the sticks across the street from cows!

I had intended to bake some of the cookies for The Girl's school fundraiser this afternoon, but decided not to risk using my electric oven with the power popping in and out.  Ended up making two more batches of cookie dough (caramel malt chip and thumbprint tea cookie) and calling it a day instead.

On the bright side, the school board meeting tonight was blessedly uncontroversial and world-record short--on balance, I'll take it!      

A Cajun Feast

It's always a good thing when Himself looks over at me and remarks, "I feel like cooking.  Let's have some friends over this weekend."

Now, he is not a day-to-day sort of cook.  99% of the time, the kitchen is my domain.  His repertoire is limited and he cooks almost exclusively in crowd-sized quantities.  But what he makes is amazing.

Back when we lived in Texas, one of his best work friends was a good ol' boy from eastern Louisiana, a proud graduate of the University of Louisiana-Lafayette.  This guy hung out with a crowd of his former frat brothers, all also from Cajun country, and every single one of those boys could cook like a dream.  (One of said frat brothers actually went to middle school with me in the United Arab Emirates, proving definitively that this is an inordinately small world.)

Anyway, under the guidance of this motley crew, Himself learned to make real gumbo, red beans and rice, and jambalaya, all of which he is going to cook for us on Saturday!  My involvement will be limited to procuring the ingredients for him and making rice and garlic bread (and possibly a salad.)  My kind of entertaining.  Two families of close friends are coming over, bringing kids, dogs, a dessert and an hors d'oeuvre between them.  We will stuff ourselves silly, drink lots of good wine and just enjoy the company.  I can't wait!

Gumbo...

            
Red beans and rice (my absolute favorite...)

And jambalaya.  Yum.

It's A Good Thing I Like To Bake...

Did not get any more holiday decorating done today, but had a nice long walk with the dog (good for both of us!) and made a bunch of necessary cookie dough instead.  I'll take it.

For various logistical reasons, The Girl does not attend the same school as her big brothers (although she will from next year on), and her current school has a big fundraiser every December that involves selling cookies.  It brings thousands of dollars into the school, but the catch is that each child's family must (yes, must--not sure what they do if you refuse) send in 12 dozen cookies by the middle of December sometime--I forget the exact date.  This means that you are seriously up a creek if you have more than one child there: one of my friends is expected to send in 36 dozen (!!) cookies, and since she is a working mother of her three children, I have no idea when the hell she is going to have time to bake that many cookies.  Especially since they want pretty holiday cookies, not run-of-the-mill chocolate chip.  Yikes.  And my mother, who ordinarily would be ALL OVER my part of this job (she is a primo baker) does not arrive with my dad for their holiday visit until a day or two after the cookies are due in.  (Never fear, she will be put to work making the traditional family favorites after she gets here!  And helping me paint my hall bathroom and take down shelves in The Girl's room and a hundred other things, but that's another post.)

Since I am constitutionally incapable of waiting until the last minute to do anything major, I started browsing cookie recipes on the Web this afternoon, printed out a stack of potential candidates, and then made two batches of cookie dough, which will be sitting in the freezer until whenever I actually have time to bake and decorate the cookies.  These two are pecan (above) and maple-walnut spice (below middle) respectively...I will also be doing gingerbread men, sugar cookies, and I think probably chai shortbread and chocolate malted cookies as well.  I don't need all of these kinds just for the cookie sale, but since I have to bake for it anyway, I will make a bunch of different kinds now and just stick some in the freezer so there is one less thing on the to-do list before Christmas dinner, which is always at our house.
 

I haven't even thought about what to serve for Christmas dinner yet, but that's OK.  One thing at a time...I think that will be my mantra for this crazy month.  In any other direction lies madness!