A post in which I do kitchen stuff

I had stuff to do tonight. I wanted to bake my tomato casserole and pack up all the dishes. Well one of them got done anyway.

I had to run by the library on the way home to pick up a couple of books I had ordered in. I’ve been trying to read a biography of Jane Austen that Justin loaned me, but it is a dry, dry read. So much so that it’s been putting me down for a brief nap at lunch every day. Not a good precedent.

The King Cake came in today. One of the agencies that we use is in Louisiana and they send one every year. Oddly, they never get here in time for Fat Tuesday. So we get this big cake shipped to the office during Lent. I suppose most people don’t know the difference, and it doesn’t make much of one here. Most of the office apparently aren’t Catholic, or didn’t give up sweets for Lent if they are; in fact one of the guys always first in line for a piece actually is Catholic, which I think is kind of funny. There is now a lot of jockeying for position as to who gets the baby. I don't think the girls have a really clear understanding of what that entails, but they all compete for it now.

I got home, changed, and got in the kitchen. The tomato casserole recipe is another one that allows you to use up odds and ends out of the fridge. I sautéed a bunch of vegetable bits I had lying around, mixed them with the canned tomatoes and stale bread, and threw it all in a casserole dish. While it was baking, I fixed supper, packed lunches for the rest of the week, and cleaned the kitchen up. By the time I got through with all that, I was pretty beat. Plus it was after 8pm. I decided I had done enough for one day. It shouldn’t take me that long to pack up the dishes tomorrow now that I have all the stuff to do it with.

I rested on the sofa for a bit, watching Bastard Out of Carolina. It was a well done movie, but was a real downer. So I flipped over to TCM, where they were showing The Diary of Anne Frank, which is of course a vast improvement and feel-good family film. Well not really. But I hadn’t seen it, and kind of felt like it was one of those movies I should see. It was fairly amusing to watch Shelly Winters performance (although personally I prefer her performance in A Patch of Blue, despite the vile character she portrayed). I was kind of watching it with one eye while I fooled around online. Things about the Holocaust are so horrible that I have to have some kind of insulation from it.

So despite the fact that a good movie was on, I wasn’t exactly horrificated when the phone rang. It was my old friend Anna, who is apparently doing much better after a rough time in her life. As always, we had so much to say to each other that we couldn’t talk fast enough. We were on the phone for almost an hour – and I just hardly ever do that.

By the time I got off the phone with her, it was way time for bed. I switched out a load of laundry and turned in.