Cooking

I seem to have a habit of cooking large amounts of food when I can't do dishes for a few days, and then finally can.  OK, so that sentence makes no sense!  We ran out of dishwasher soap, so I had to buy more, but I didn't have time to get to the store right away.  It took two days before I had time, and had to do dishes by hand.  And just thinking of doing dishes by hand makes me feel......

...scared, sad and abused! (That's what happens when you grow up doing dishes by hand when there are 13 of you!  -to be fair, Mom always did the heavy pots and pans.)

Some might think this is an exaggeration, but really, it's not.  Really.  No really!  She'sh!  Maybe a little!

So I finally get soap, I now have to use and wash every dish I own.  But I can't wash clean dishes, I must cook many things. Many difficult things.  I made fried green tomatoes.  Not as hard as I thought they would be.  Not bad, either.  I was a little scared to eat them, but they weren't bad.  As I said, I had to dirty all the dishes in the house, right?  Well, this is what I did first. I didn't read the directions.  Second, I threw all the ingredients together and got mush, and then thought, "This isn't going to work."  It was all pasty and not going to coat the tomato slices.  When I read the directions it made things so much clearer!  But I did dirty several bowls and utensils.

Taylor likes the cornmeal coating, better than the tomatoes.  They tasted kind citrus-y to me.

Next I started to make Acorn flour.  To make it you need to first play "sink or swim."  Basically, float the nuts to see which one's float, if they float they are bad.  Since I had two kids helping, I had two small pots for the floating, one pot big pot for the good and a bowl for the bad.  Then I thought, this big pot is too big, so I got out the medium pot, and eventually realized I should have just used the big pot after all.

Here you can see the big, medium and small pot and the bowl.  But you have to really look.  I must add that making acorn flour is not easy.  My hands HURT!  First, you take all the good ones then rinse the dirt off them, then shell them (this took about 2 hours for aone gallon bag), then you have to boil them for hours or days, depending on the type of acorn.  I have no idea what kind I have.  Then roast them and then finally grind them into flour.  Whew!

Then I wanted to make apple crisp.  I bought apples for just this purpose!  Since apples are in season it should be a nice treat.  For me and Jason, anyway.  The kids won't eat it.  I first pulled out a small casserole dish, well it turns out I underestimated, again.  And I had to pull out a much larger dish.

Looks tasty!

I think I am going to end up with one entire load of dishes that are completely clean except that they touched  uncooked food for a few seconds.

With all of this going on I am having to call and find out from the school why I haven't heard from them about Taylor being able to take French II.  I called and found out that the Superintendent wanted a detailed description of what we are going to be covering!  Ridiculous!  I'm supposed to tell them that in World Geography we will be studying the worlds geography?  And that in Algebra we will be covering Algebra?  After some discussion he finally says that he wants the title of the books.  Whew, that took a while to communicate!  And I told him I'm using Abeka.  He was happy with that.  Now I have to write it on a piece of paper and send it too him.  Because it must be in writing.  Ugh!

My hands hurt.