Monday, December 18, 2017

Lunch Adventures

(Posted a week late because - life.)

Today's lunch was an adventure.
The day started hard for me. I had no energy, I stayed up late working on an alteration and then once I went to bed it was up a couple times to comfort the girls, a couple times for pregnancy discomfort.. just very little sleep. When the girls woke up I was dragging, we had power bars for breakfast because we're out of cereal and I just wasn't fixing breakfast.
Finally when lunch time rolled around I was feeling a little more alive and as Jerusha brought me a red potato asking if we could play baseball with it I decided, "no, but let's cook it for lunch, okay?" And that became the plan;  we'd make breakfast for lunch.

We diced up a couple red potatoes and put them in the skillet with butter, olive oil, and some seasonings. I pulled the eggs out of the refrigerator. So I had the start to a decent breakfast for lunch but it needed the “fluff”. I needed to whip up a batch of pancakes.. or biscuits.. or something.. something like doughnuts. (Doughnuts? Donuts? I never know..)

I’d been wanting to try doughnuts out for awhile so I pulled up Pinterest on my phone looking for a ‘quick cake donut recipe’ and thumbed through the donut section of my go-to recipe book. I quickly discovered donuts aren’t a ‘quick’ recipe but since I’m not one to let following exact instructions stand in my way I settled on a recipe and went for it, skipping the ‘refrigeraterate for one hour’ part.

They really turned out okay. No thanks to Éowyn who kept pulling a chair up and hanging on me as I tried to quickly cut and fry three at a time. My oil kept getting too hot because I was using such a tiny pan and being inconsistent with my timing. I was frustrated with Wyn and kept putting her down telling her to “just leave me alone for a few minutes”. Jerusha, ever the wonderful sensitive sister stood up on the chair and yelled at me “hey, don’t be angry at my Wyn sister” then she leaned her head on to my arm and began petting me “You is awesome at this Mommy, You is just awesome at making  food. Wyn is okay, okay?”
The failings of my donuts were (1) the oil temperature fluctuating too much and (2) the dough not being chilled so being difficult to work with and being dense from lack of proper rising. A couple soaked up a little too much grease but over all I was happy with them.
On another day, with proper planning ahead, I’d like to do it again.




Friday, December 1, 2017

The Infamous Scarf




















You may recall my mention of this scarf back in 2015 when I was resolving to complete unfinished projects...

When Wesley and I were engaged in the fall of 2013 we picked out this yarn together and I started knitting away.
It's been so long that I honestly don't even remember the details that led to that happening but I think it was something down the lines of:
Wesley: Scarves are never long enough to wrap around my neck and tuck into my coat right.
Me: Really? Pick some yarn out and I can knit you one!
.....who knew I meant I could with four years time? :P

So, I've finally completed it and in time for the cold season four years later. Obviously I never worked very faithfully on it or it wouldn't have taken so long. I am by no means a fast knitter but this fall when I got it back out to work on and did so in every minute of spare and idle handed time I made good progress and more than doubled what had taken me three years thus far. My problem was always paying enough attention to knitting in order to keep up with the pattern so this year with being home alone so many evenings, the girls tucked sleeping into bed, I would work for a couple hours or just half an hour a night and it went pretty quickly.

I am so very excited to have finished this and I'm pretty sure Wesley is more excited to finally have it.