Monday, January 16, 2012

Week 2

Resolutions


I pretty well failed at my resolutions this past week, allowing some hiccoughs in normal routine to completely throw my willpower overboard. I didn't even finish my book for the week, so I'll be working on that one for a little while yet.

Cooking


Last week was a fairly uneventful week in the adventures of me learning how to cook. After realizing that Dearest also has a slight citric acid allergy (judging by the fact that things in the citrus and tomato groups make his tongue and lips tingle, swell, and itch) I decided to forego the red pasta sauce and make my own white sauce. It's a fairly simple process, according to our uncle Dave. Just butter, flour, and milk in a pan; stir until it looks right and season to taste. Simple enough!

Except that I have the amazing power to screw anything up and my sauce was too thick and too flour-y tasting. Instead of trying to fix it (and probably messing it up further) I decided to repurpose it. "This," I thought, "tastes like pancake batter. Tomorrow, it will be pancakes!"

Not so much. But trying to cook the sauce/batter and ending up with a pretty tasty goop made me think that I might be able to make it white sauce after all. I took out a wider, shallower pan and some extra butter and milk and tried it.

It was all right. Bland but all right. As I was trying to make it work, Dearest came up and said "That looks like gravy" which frustrated me, so I served him pasta and 'gravy' for breakfast. Which he then liberally applied salt and pepper to. However, I think he was right. After tasting it with a more open mind I've decided that all it's really missing is the sausage and sausage grease.

So next week, we will be making biscuits (from scratch, since there's not a darned pre-made biscuit out there that doesn't have some form of soy in it) and sausage gravy. I'm actually pretty excited about that, since it was one of my favorite childhood breakfasts. Maybe I'll get uncle Dave's soda biscuit recipe from him.

I'm also trying a rosemary scalloped potatoes recipe this coming week, we'll see how that goes.

Other news


My brother in law was ordained the associate pastor of his little church in Federal Way yesterday, Jared and I went to the ceremony to support him. It was a good thing we were there, because it also snowed yesterday and Mom got stuck in Tacoma. Obviously, we couldn't let Mom miss her kid being ordained so we went to get her and all turned out well.

It snowed yesterday and some more today, though at the moment it's melting again. I got some really great pictures out of it. Dearest reminded me that my phone has the picture-taking capacity of a regular camera so I've been trying to learn to use it as much as/well as I can use a regular camera. Keep in mind, I'm an amateur hobbyist picture taker, not a photographer (lol).

I still haven't found a job, so I'm planning on widening my search. Fortunately, there are a lot of little shops and whatnot and Dearest and I have already made friends with one of the local business owners (her name is Mary and she owns a delightful little shop called Happy Delusions, Momma would like it a lot). Hopefully that means that once I start pounding pavement instead of computer keys, I'll have something solid within a week or so. I might even be able to work at The Terrible Beauty. That would be super fun...and probably devastating to my cholesterol levels.

Out of boredom, I restarted my food- and wedding-focused tumblr blogs. Yeah, I know, restarted two blogs and didn't finish my book. Bad time management choices. I'm still working on that. In any case, I've got a bunch of stuff queued up so I don't *have* to go check on them every day for them to post. So if you're interested, yumiliciosity.tumblr.com and alittleobsessedwithweddings.tumblr.com are my blogs. Feel free to check them out.

There are some developments with Dearest's work that I won't talk about yet but let's just say they're developments and I might not be capable of being cordial to his boss next time I see him. No worries though, things are going fairly well regardless and God is providing in some neat and odd ways.

Speaking of which: Because of the medical situation last year, and moving, and all the stuff that happened last month, this month was going to be a little tight. Add on to that the fact that our usual breakfast of protein shakes was unavailable because of a backorder situation at the warehouses, and the new no-soy shopping I had to do, and we were about a half week short on food with no more money available to get said food. I realized this about two days into the month, and I let God know that he was going to have to fix it, since I had no choices. And, go figure, I open up my freezer to put away the veggies and chicken and see that it's already full of food. Naturally, I checked with the guy who used to live here (and now lives upstairs) to see if it was his. He said that it had actually been left behind by one of his roommates and if we wanted it we were welcome to it.

Neat, huh?

(photo is not my freezer, but is a somewhat accurate representation of how full mine was)

So, that's us over the past week. Hopefully at some point this week I'll get a chance to blog about something that I can exercise my writing abilities over. They've been cooped up for a while.

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