A post in which I am again cooking.

Eventually.

I’ve still got a lot of irons in the fire this week.

The first person in Credit came down with Swine Flu this week. One of the girls called in with H1N1. One of the women today went around spraying stuff in the office with Lysol. Of course she was here all last week, so it’s kind of moot at this point. And I’m more worried about my periodic squiffiness. I’m wondering if I should go on to the doctor this week.

I called Liberty Tap Room today and talked to the manager about how crappy our service was yesterday. It was a very interesting conversation. If everyone with me hadn’t had such a bad experience, I probably wouldn’t have called; I just wouldn’t have gone back. But the food was really good, and they are just around the corner from me as well. When I started talking, the manager interrupted me to ask who my server had been. When I told him, he said “Ah. Yes. This isn’t the first complaint I’ve had about him. He came in with a really bad attitude yesterday, and I let him go. I probably shouldn’t have waited until the end of his shift.” He was very nice about it, and apologized. He’s also going to comp part of the meal the next time we come in, which I thought was decent of him. That really wasn’t why I called, but since he was so nice I’ll go back in now. Plus the food really was good.

Afterwards I talked to Laura, and we discussed what happened yesterday. She invited me again to come watch the game at their house tonight. I would really, really love to go, but I just have to get the baking done. I might be able to fudge a night, but Jason wants to go to dinner Wednesday, and the way my luck in the kitchen has been running lately, I just don’t think I can take another night off. I just really hate to have to turn down an invitation to Kimblee and Laura’s house!

I got a pleasant surprise in the mail today at work, which just hardly ever happens. One of my agencies sent me a gift certificate for dinner at one of my favorite Indian restaurants, Saffron. They said it was just a Thanksgiving thing. I'm pretty stoked about that. I guess I'll take Jason out for Indian. He says he loves curry, which is another great thing about him.

I talked to the attorney who’s doing the closing on the re-finance on the house, and apparently I’m ready to close now, so I’ll be doing that tomorrow. I’m really ready to get that done and get my window guy started. The windows aren’t ordered until they get the deposit. Maybe other people plan better than I do, and there won’t be tons of people having new windows put in over the holidays. If so I could get them a bit sooner, which would be nice.

I had to run errands all the way home. Of course I had to go by the store. I was dangerously low on butter and eggs, so I got them. I also hadn’t bought the regular groceries for the week and had to pick up a couple of things.

I had a dilemma on what to do with the ugly pie I made yesterday. Clearly serving it at the campout was out of the question. Then I remembered that one of the dancer’s boys next door had said that anything I didn’t want they would eat. I went over and talked to Frankie, and she said sure, to bring the pie on over. So I did. I was embarrassed to take it to them, but it’s better than throwing it away. If they do it, fine, but I can’t just throw food away. She's getting me tickets to see Nutcracker again this year too, which will be nice :). She's dancing the Sugar Plum Fairy this year, which is exciting. She is so graceful and lovely.

I got another chocolate chess pie in the oven and ate supper while it baked. I ran completely out of sugar making that pie. Unbelievable. I started baking with about seven pounds of sugar and ran out. Of course having to make stuff &*^%$#@!! twice doesn’t help with that. So I had to go back to the store.

When I got back I cleaned up the kitchen and made icing, then iced the carrot cake. The icing tasted great but it was for a sheet cake, not a layer cake, so it wasn’t quite as firm as it needed to be for what I was doing. So it kept kind of globbing down the sides of the cake. I worked on it for a while, remembering that I don’t usually do layer cakes specifically because they end up looking like Home Economics 'D' projects. Eventually I just realized it wasn’t going to look any better, and threw it in the freezer. So it will taste fine, and fortunately it looks like gluing the layers a bit with icing (to hold them together, they were a bit crumbly) seemed to work, but it looks like something Shrek might have made. I hope Gene likes his homely cake.

After I cleaned all that up, I started on the pumpkin squares. That is a fairly easy recipe, thank God, but I was so tired I managed to make a mistake on that one too, although fortunately a minor one. The streusel that goes over the top is made of nuts, sugar, butter and cake mix. I forgot to put the extra sugar in. As a result, my streusel actually rose partially. Once again, it should taste fine, but it looks kind of like I left the cake out in the rain and some kind of fungus grew on it. So I have MacArthur Park pumpkin squares.

By the end of the cleanup from that one, my legs were killing me. I took some aspirins and went to bed. I’m worn out. I’m not as discouraged as I was last night, but this is going to be the ugliest batch of desserts I have ever made for the campout. I took heart from the count though; four down and one to go. All I have left to make is the apple cobbler.