Strike

I am burnt to a cinder. Sizzled to a crisp. Ready for an extended vacay in a land with no kitchens. If I never see the innards of another supermarket it'll be too soon. If I have to wash another pot, I will flip my lid. If this week was a book it'd be the Berenstain Bears and Too Much Cooking! Kiddie Cooking Class was the final spatula. I am coming off quite a bender of Kitchenicity. I spent the majority of the past week testing a jelly donut muffin recipe for an article I wrote. I finally figured it out after the fourth batch. I should have known all along that the testing is the easy part, the writing is where it gets rough. How many ways can you say yummy? How to describe messy projects as tidily as possible? Sometimes I feel like I am sifting through a pile of junk searching for a gem.

Kiddie Cooking Class project was tomato soup with crispy parmesan croutons. I improvised by using tomato sauce instead of whole canned tomatoes the recipe called for, knowing full well that lots of kids have issues with chunky textures when it comes to soup. I should've substituted it with tomato puree instead. The kiddies swallowed up the soup, due in no small part to the fact that I threw handfulls of parmesan cheese into it in addition to the DELICIOUS parmesan croutons. But the soup was unnecessarily salty, next time-tomato puree.
This morning I did a chocolate project with Girlette's class which was cute and fun and really easy. Cleaning up after a chocolate project with kids is like dealing with the aftermath of a chocolate tornado. No matter how much fun it is to witness the unfettered glee of kids wrist deep in chocolate, the scraping and scrubbing still sucks.
I was thinking that I would get a head start on the eggnog cheesecakes I'm giving our neighbors for Xmas (they freeze beautifully)- but there's no #$%*& way that's happening tonight. Tonight I am watching Top Chef and eating cereal.