Craziness and Sadness

LAWKI Day 26

September 14, 2010

Breakfast: Oatmeal (pretty much panned by the kids)

Lunch: Kids-school, M&S-?

Dinner: Spaghetti and Meatballs, homemade breadsticks

This was one crazy busy day, with 2 evening school meetings and 1 church one where the Relief Society was coming to see the puzzle on the wall and the new cabinets in the basement. As I am writing this 2 days later, I just don’t remember much.

LAWKI Day 27

September 15, 2010

Today was a sad day. Barry Diamond, the 1^st Counselor in my ward’s Bishopric, died after a 8 month battle with cancer. He was just 51. I found that I wanted to cook and eat all day, which is what I pretty much did. It seems callous to keep writing about something so dumb as LAWKI Month when a real tragedy has touched so many in my circle. It also takes me back to Michael’s cancer and makes so much of our daily business and “struggles” so unimportant.

As I sat at my desk pondering things, I distracted myself with trying to clean up my computer files a bi. I found a file in my recipes that was titled “main dishes I want to try.” One was a ham (spam), rice, and broccoli casserole. I had a bit of rice in the fridge, and I knew I still had a bit of frozen broccoli left so I decided to try that. It called for the broccoli to be frozen still as it was put into the oven. I mixed it all in a glass pan, thinking I would just put it in the fridge until the kids got home from school and then bake it.

Just before I put the plastic wrap on, I looked over into the family room and saw the Sun Oven there. I switched it to a round Corel dish with a lid and put it in the Sun Oven instead. I have my back “porch,” all 9 sq of it, and that is where I put my Sun Oven. It was about 11:30 when I stuck it out there, and due to the angle of the sun and height of my house, it was still in the shade. I pointed it toward where I thought it would get the most in the next few hours and left it. It was probably about 2 before I checked it again, only to find that the sky had a very wispy thin cloud cover and the oven was barely at 200 degrees. I forgot about it again until about 3pm, and when I checked it this time, I could tell the broccoli was turning an unappetizing brown color. It was a bit sunnier, but still only about 230 degrees.

I decided to pull it out and see how it looked and felt. When I opened the lid, it was very hot and completely warmed through. The cheese had melted and the flavors blended. The Spam was really quite good in this. While the broccoli on the top of the casserole was brown and not pretty to see, it was perfectly cooked through, as was the all of the casserole. This really turned out well, and I ate bites from the bowl for the next 3 hours. All of the kids tried bites of it, but none of them really liked it much. Michael did not try it, but will take it in his lunch for tomorrow. Funny how in the end, this was 4-1 against it taste wise, but because I am the 1 for it, I think it was a success. I am such a control freak.

James had to make cinnamon rolls for his scouts tonight. We did the sour cream cinnamon rolls that are to die for. It was worth using the last bits of sour cream (minus the one I have) for these. He actually did most of the making on these, until he had to go early and I finished rolling the last batches out. I wonder how I could “sour” milk to make these without sour cream and how easy it would be to make with oil instead of butter. I am just grateful for the fact that cream cheese lasts for 4-6 months in the fridge and butter indefinitely in the freezer. That is my kind of food storage.

Breakfast: kids-cereal, toast M-? S-fried egg and bacon sandwich (after everyone was gone, shame on me for not sharing)

Lunch: kids-school, M-at work, lunch from home, S-BLT (did I mention I ate all day? We had 8 half pieces of bacon left over from something, and it was turning brown so it had to be eaten, right?), broccoli

Dinner: K-toast, sandwiches, forced bites of casserole, cinnamon rolls, M-work, S-casserole and anything else I could find, including too many cinnamon rolls.

Oh, and one fortunate timing benefit of LAWKI month…an empty fridge when the Young Women from church needed to store the 600 sandwiches they made for the homeless shelter for tomorrow’s dinner. I fit about 40 bread bags filled with sandwiches in the outside fridge and another 10 in the inside one. Yeah!

The casserole as it was first in the Sun Oven, and me taking the picture.

A bigger View of the oven and our porch still in shade.

This is actually the casserole before it was cooked. I still cannot seem to put the pictures in the right order!

This is the casserole after cooking.

LAWKI Day 28

September 16, 2010

Breakfast: Cinnamon rolls

Lunch: Kids-school, M- lunch casserole (he liked it), S-tuna with crackers-we are out of bread

Dinner: Bean Enchiladas with different sauce, homemade tortillas

The tortillas were not as good this time, but I had a lot of things going on at the same time, including needing to do carpool in the middle of rolling them out. The enchiladas were really boring and unimpressive. I think now that the TVP in the first batch I made 2 weeks ago made more of a difference than I thought. It was hard to spend so much time making them and have them be less than stellar.

My neighbor brought me a huge box of apples, a small fraction of what her farmer dad brought to her. I spent some time looking online for applesauce recipes. In doing so, I stumbled across a fun web site: http://foodstoragemadeeasy.net/ It was interesting to see some of the things that I have talked about in this LAWKI blog on that web site. This week the ladies who run it are doing their own daily challenges: no water today, no electricity tomorrow, etc. I guess September is National Emergency Prep Month. And I thought it was just an advertising scheme that Macey’s bulk sale and Emergency Essentials had made up. Seems we picked the right month to do this in after all. Does this mean that October is National Emergency Month?

I debated what I would do if the phone call came asking if I could help with food for the funeral, and they asked me to make a salad or potatoes. Would I feel bad shopping for food for this purpose? I decided that as I would not be eating the food, it really did not matter. And really, it does not matter either way. I would not keep playing a stupid game when something important happened. As it was, I lucked out and they asked me if I would make a dessert. That I can do.