Poor planning

I was determined to have a few marathon cooking sessions over this weekend so that I could concentrate on the rest of the week with a minimum of distraction.

So! Into the kitchen went I on Saturday at about 11 a.m. The morning was spent grabbing a few essentials, including a few new canning jars, hamburgers, chicken breasts, and such.

Two batches went into one of my newly purchased Kerr jars. Hooray for mayo!

All did not go according to plan, however. I had some trouble separating the yolks from the whites and ended up wasting an egg or two that way. Since mayo requires yolks only, I ended up with a bunch of whites.

Self, thought I, I will try to make meringues.

So I whipped up the egg whites, added less honey due to the immense amount in the recipe from the Pecanbread site, a little vanilla, and I had a shiny fluffy mass of meringue. Yay.

I spooned it into a large Ziploc bag and cut the corner off to pipe them into little piles of what looked like white angel poop, for I am fancy.

And then I set the oven at around 200 degrees, and stuck them in there.

I fed Clark my last hamburger for lunch and there was no more leftover food, which meant there was nothing for me to eat. I made a batch of ketchup and got that packaged up in my second Kerr jar. Two hours later, at 1 p.m., I checked the meringues. They were not dried out.

I took a little nap. At 2 p.m., they were still not done. Finally I jacked up the heat on the oven to 300 and 20 minutes later, they were closer to done, but not really, so my first batch of meringues was not a success at all.

I was also in a low blood sugar rage and nobody wanted to be around me. I scraped up some of the meringue substance and ate it off the sheet, and perked up. I fed a few to Clark who thought they were the bees knees. Guess I'll have to try those again sometime.

I tossed a pan of hamburgers and a pan of chicken into the oven. Those were done at around 3:15, and I finally got to have lunch along with my migraine. Boo.

And that was my Saturday disaster. *sigh* At least Clark got to have chicken salad for dinner, which he loves.

On to Sunday!

I made Clark and I carrot pancakes for breakfast.



Clark was very happy to polish off, oh, nine of them or so. And then I told him he couldn't have any more so I could eat something. Sheesh.


No mother, he's not starving. I swear.

We then went to Ikea, which was buckets of fun as usual. I got a $2 frying pan, a $5 package of food storage containers, and Swedish coffee. Oh, you Swedes. I love your sense of style, your commitment to environmental responsibility, and your sassy food choices. Jeffrey picked up some Christmas gifts for Clark on the sly. Clark loves their little wood train sets.

Then, home again. I was all about soup today. I had put some bags of chicken parts in the fridge to thaw. Jeffrey informed me in the morning that one of them had sprung a leak. Why not, I love salmonella in the morning.

Anyway, I put on a big ol' pot of chicken soup to boil. Then I decided to play with butternut squash. Jeffrey had oh so helpfully peeled a big one for me.

So I put four pounds of butternut squash, about 1 1/2 sweet onions, and 1 pound of peeled and cored apples chopped up in a soup pan. I added 10 cups of water.

Then I sat down and cried as every muscle in my right arm was hurting from chopping up all of that. Whee. Hey, at least my wrist wasn't too bad, which was a miracle.

I simmered the squash soup for about an hour and a half. Then I pulled out every bit of the onion and processed the soup through my blender in batches.

The first batch had about half the squash and all of the apples. I added 1/2 tsp of ginger and 1/2 tsp of salt to that batch and ate that with Clark.

Too much ginger! Clark didn't like it. Oh well.

The second batch, which was the rest of the squash, I processed with 1/4 tsp ginger, 1/2 tsp cinnamon, and 1/4 tsp salt. This tasted better, but still a bit bland. Also the onions were a bit too strong I think.

So I will work on that more before I post a recipe. It was great fun and delicious anyway. Hooray.

Next I made two pans of egg bread, and they really weren't dried out enough, but oh well. Into the baggies they went for Clark's lunch tomorrow.

I then made a pan of almond butter brownies. I seem to be tolerating them now, yay! I ate three of them and nothing bad happened. I had stopped at Whole Foods to get another jar of almond butter, and they were totally out of the cheap brand. That made me mad, until I opened the pantry and saw a jar that I had apparently forgotten existed. Um. Yay!

And then my chicken soup was done at about 5 p.m. I let it sit on the stove until 7, and separated out the chicken and I still burned my fingers. Blah.

But I had a great haul of food. I have a biggish container of squash soup, two big containers of chicken soup, a small amount of chicken salad that I'll be eating at lunch today, some almond butter brownies, egg bread, and I still have a decent amount of mayo and ketchup to last me the week.

I did a bunch of other stuff over the weekend and still somehow feel relaxed. It's interesting. For the butternut squash soup, I peeled two apples. It took me like five seconds and I didn't even think about it being odd or too much work. Huh. Old me would have definitely thought it was a pain. I probably would have whined about it too. Hmm.

So that is a rundown of another SCD weekend for you. :)