Busy-ness.....Meals...

I try keeping busy. I do a little cleaning, a little cooking, a little gardening and these days a little knitting. It fills the time, gives me a sense of accomplishment, a full stomach, a somewhat clean house and more sweaters than I will ever wear in a life time!!

Still by the fifth week of doing all this busy-ness, it gets a little boring. I need to use the creative muscle a bit more. Well, believe me, I don't get very creative about cleaning, but I can, when pushed create some interesting meals or make the mundane meals a little more interesting and I can definitely push the limits on gardening.

Meals

I think I've mentioned that we've recruited our youngest to make pizza from scratch every Saturday night. He's a Gordon Ramsey devotee and can make pizza dough without a measuring cup!! This, in itself, is a miracle. The only drawback, in the process, is that he takes pictures every step of the way, for Instagram posts. What might be a prep. time of an hour or two is now an hour or four!! Fortunately, he gets up about 3:00pm in the afternoon (I know, when was the last time you were able to stay up past midnight.) and we get him started on dinner, then or we'd be eating at midnight!

In the meantime, I have resurrected four French Onion Soup bowls that I bought at Kitchen Plus for $15.00 - for the set!! I've used them once, because it took me all day one October to make the soup. The accountant in me says, that would be about $4.50 per serving, not counting the cost of the stock, onions, bread and cheese, sigh.

Fortunately, I decided to use them again this week for what started out as a tortiere and ended up as shepherd's pie, because I decided to use tomato and mashed potatoes instead of pastry - down to $2.25 per serving. Plus I could use up some stale hamburger buns, because there wasn't enough filling to properly fill the bowls and mashed potatoes look silly somewhere in the middle of a soup bowl. The hamburger buns (half of one per bowl) filled the bottom of the soup bowls, soaked up the liquid and did a great french imitation of a sloppy Joe. I thought I could do a cute translation for sloppy Joe, until I found out that I had a choice of three french words for sloppy - negligeé, débraillé or per soigné. Now to decide which one goes with Josef. Clearly this needs another post.

The soup bowls were a hit, so much so that I am making chicken and biscuits tonight and serving it in the individual bowls. I should clean out my "china" cabinet more often!

Gardening - next post.