Test ONE!

My baby boy is turning ONE - so before I have another 10-month-delayed postpartum incident, let me get to the point.

I had been trying to decide whether to host Houston's party at our house, or go somewhere cool like Kaleidoscope. The pros of somewhere else: NOT CLEANING. The pros of staying home: not spending money to rent a facility (although it may be THE coolest place for a newly-budding toddler), letting Houston relax in his own environment (I don't know WHERE he gets his shyness from... cough, cough), and not being limited to certain dates and times.

Soooo... obviously the pros for staying home outweigh the negatives - especially in these times when we're trying to save as much money as possible. So the Domestic Dunce's FIRST test is Houston's big birthday BASH! I am hoping to clean, cook and hostess my first major event (other than ones for friends who already know me and don't really care) for friends and family on March 6!

That means I have a little over ONE month to get this house in tip top shape, my recipes in order, and my prettiest outfit ironed. It may sound minor, but this is the first test to help me turn from Domestic Dunce to DOMESTIC DIVA! 

I was psyched to find two last slices of bread for my sandwich this morning. I was NOT psyched that they were the heels. I thought I was the queen of ranting... but I think this guy hates bread heels more than me:

Week 1 - success!

As I slid the pork roast into the oven tonight, I thought back, one week ago to my pork attempt/fiasco last week, and realized amidst all my struggles, that I had been successful in my cooking debut. I cooked meals 4 out of 5 weekdays last week (and one well-deserved Panera break with my favorite neighbor!), which is a huge step up from ONE per week.

It's the start of a new week, which means I'll probably need another trip to the grocery store this week. Any suggestions? Comment or email me!

And PS - thanks for the HUGE support since the start of this blog! Keep reading for what's sure to be new and exciting, and probably dangerous, experiments in the house! :)

Even the best cooks were dunces once

Justin and I shared a delicious dinner at my grandmother's house last night - she is an amazing cook. Nothing gourmet or fancy... just great home cooking. 

Yet she told me a story of when she first got married and started cooking for my grandfather, and decided to make him a pie. She had heard that, when in doubt, add an egg. So she whipped up an apple pie and threw in an egg for good measure. She set the pie on the windowsill to cool (old school, right?) and when my grandfather came home from work, sliced into it. And there, amidst the apple filling, were scrambled eggs.

...and he ate it anyway.

I guess there's still hope for me yet - maybe when I'm 70 I'll finally have my act together!

Ode to....YOU?

You can have an "Ode to" too! Send me your favorite recipe and let my try my hand at it! Remember, I'm a recovering dunce, so leave the Julia Child stuff to Julia... I need the basics for now. Or, if you're aiming for a humorous read, send the Julia stuff too.

Ode to Sarah Smith

So dinner started out a bit tragic... but ended up decent!

I found two things that make me a better chef - confidence and pinot noir, and believe it or not, the pinot helps the ol' confidence factor and it works in a happy cycle - the better I feel, the more I drink, the more I drink, the more confident I feel.

So it started at Hannaford yesterday when I bought the ol' pork tenderloin. I kinda thought it would be like the roasts that are tied up with string? Big and loggish? But this thing, labelled "whole pork tenderloin" looked more like an elephant's penis. Long, skinny, pink. I brought it home and thought about it for a while more while searching for a home in my fridge for the thing... it felt too dirty to mix in with the rest of the food in my meat drawer. I wondered how it would look when it was done. It had to change form in the oven or something, right?

I had a recipe that sounded delicious from my college friend, Sarah Smith (not related, unless you trace our lineage back to John Smith... lover of Pocohantas). But when I unwrapped the penis, I started doubting myself. I had Justin run back to the grocery store and buy some thick piece of meat, but after confirming with Sarah that it SHOULD look like a penis (really?) I felt a bit better. (Side note: anyone have a recipe for pork end roast?) Here's the recipe: one pork penis (j/k... it's funny in my own mind only because I'm still drunk), a bag of baby carrots, two cut up potatoes, two jars of sweet and sour sauce. Put all the ingredients in a glass baking dish and dump the sauce over the whole thing. Bake in the oven for an hour, covered, at 375 for an hour.

EASY!

Except apparently, my oven sees tinfoil and just shuts off.

WTF?! Every time I cook something covered with tin foil, it just doesn't cook. Sure enough, I took the loin out an hour later, unwrapped it, and the whole thing looked exactly the same as it had an hour earlier. I texted Sarah in a panic, and she told me to try uncovering and cooking for a half hour.

Sure enough, 30 minutes later the tenderloin was cooked PERFECTLY. It was amazing! The veggies were still a little crunchy, but my crowd liked them better that way anyway.

Oh, did I tell you I was cooking for GUESTS? Like I said, I was drunk. And everything worked out fine. Self-confidence and wine. The perfect recipe.

TenderLOIN?

Does the LOIN part of tenderloin mean penis shaped? Because I bought a pork tenderloin at Hannaford for a recipe for dinner tonight and was slightly embarrassed to check out at the register. I swear my face turned red just taking it out of the package... just wondering.

Check back later for an update on penis dinner tonight :)

I'm gonna make MILLIONS...

...when I invent the BEST accessory EVER for other "Domestic Dunces" like myself.

You know when you find a really great recipe in a cookbook, but you read the list of ingredients and go, "Shallots, what the eff are shallots? Welp, I'll figure it out when I get to the grocery store." Then you get to the grocery store and realize that no, you will never ever find that mystery ingredient...?

GPS FOR GROCERY CARTS! Type in the ingredient, and it navigates your cart STRAIGHT to the necessary food product. How friggen awesome would that be?

I spent 20 minutes looking for FOOD COLORING Wednesday morning, only to realize they had NONE! I knew where it was supposed to be, but if I'd had a GPS on my grocery cart, I would have realized earlier that they were sold out, instead of scouring through the beer aisle wondering if maybe they had some special food dye end cap or something.

Welp, see you poor suckers later - I'm off to get a patent, head off to Shark Tank, and make enough money to HIRE myself a gourmet chef.

THE recipe

Sooo... it's been awhile. You can blame Justin for that. He thought he did the impossible - catch a virus on a Mac! We were really kicking ourselves about NOT installing anti-virus software, but turns out the ol' girl's fine. Phew. It was really rough not being able to use Facebook for 24 hours.

So about that cooking thing. It's been a while there too. I've enjoyed my old friends, Domino and Spaghetti-o lately. Oh well, I'll be back at it after the weekend. I promise. Kinda.

In the meantime, chew on this fabulous family recipe, called "The Recipe"

1 serving = 1 cup cooked elbow noodles, 1 slice of American cheese broken into 4s and jammed into the noodley concoction, 1 mini can of spicy V-8 poured lovingly over the top. Mmm. Poor man's spaghetti, and 1 whole serving of veggies. God knows we don't get many of those in this household!

Oh! And so psyched to start reading my new cooking for babies book - we'll see. So far he's the only one getting square meals, a la Gerber, Earth's Best and Beech Nut. Phew.

Oh, F*#@!

Typically the Gap isn't the place where you're dropping F bombs...

unless you find your baby dangling from the bottom of his stroller, looking up at you with his head on the seat and his feet dangling on the hardwood floor. Apparently "dunce" moments don't just happen at home. Really, this is something that would only happen to me.

Justin and I were shopping at the mall and he decided to try on some jeans. I had been holding Houston because he was a bit antsy (my baby? nahhh) and Justin had been pushing his stroller. Naturally, it's nearly impossible to hold a wiggle worm and push a stroller, so I bribed him back into his seat with some puffs (God and Gerber's greatest contribution to baby food). Justin would only be in the changing room for a few minutes, I figured, and Houston was so squirmy and agitated, I consciously decided NOT to buckle him in to his stroller. It's not like I forgot, I just was lazy and irritated.

So we were browsing in a little nook, waiting for Justin, when I looked down and saw Houston sink, quickly, out through the bottom of his highchair. I literally threw the shirt I was looking at, and dropped a rather loud F bomb in the process, running around the stroller like it was a game of duck, duck goose. He was at such an awkward angle (kind of like a backwards L?) that I couldn't lift him by the armpits. I had to find his chunky butt and push him back up through the stroller into a sitting position. He never cried or anything, just looked at me like, wtf, mom?

I'm pretty confident that no one else witnessed my 10 seconds of public humiliation/bad parenting, but I learned my lesson - no matter what, buckle in the baby.

"This was back in the day, when my mom cared about me and my safety."  ~Houston