The cowboy and I have made some rules for our lives, and they work pretty well, and we don’t get into each other’s hair much. (Noted: it is hard to get into a baldish man’s hair, though.) It is a good arrangement: He does everything outside and he cooks and cleans up, and I occasionally do the laundry, but I do ALL the ironing. You probably know how much ironing comes with Wranglers and Carhartts, but whatever there is, I do it! (insert smiley face here). Also, we have a nice lady to tidy our house once in a while, and I pay for her to do her thing. It works well, and we both seem happy with the arrangement.
In a rare moment of weakness, I said, “We are having guests on Tuesday, so why don’t I cook? Just one time.” He had been slaving away outside, mowing, putting new gravel in the driveway, planting flowers, and he varnished the windowsills, which were beginning to peel. It was almost lunchtime, and I felt a WEE bit guilty, because my morning had been filled with soap operas and bon-bons. (If you believe that, you don’t know me well, but I did feel a bit guilty.)
We had invited guests for a meal, which we do now and then, and I thought to myself, Okay, lazy girl, you can cook this dinner. Just once but be careful not to make it a habit. My exact words were, “I’ll cook tonight, no worries, we’ll flip a coin about cleaning up.” And he was good with it but had never seen my double-headed nickel. (Shhhh!)
I used to be a good cook, maybe not great, but nobody starved either, so I thought easy peasy, piece of cake. The menu was barbecued ribs, green salad, stuffed mushrooms, angel food cake with berries and whipped cream. I have cooked them all many times, no problem. Well, that’s kind of a lie because I had purchased the whole menu at Costco many times.
Problem 1: Columbus, Montana, doesn’t have a Costco, rather an IGA with a great variety of food and we try to patronize the local store, but they didn’t carry barbecued ribs. We would have to go to Billings, 45 minutes away. Okay, we hopped in the truck (as much as these 77-year-olds can hop), and off we went. Costco had ribs, ready to go, but only if you bought them in groups of 36 ribs. The cowboy calls it a 55-gallon drum of ribs. So, I was still rib-less. We went to Albertsons’ and found the ribs, the right size, but pricey, as is everything these days.
Problem 2: My stuffed mushrooms, delicious and easy to make, called for cream cheese, which is currently nearly $10/package at my local grocery. Yikes! I grimaced at the price and bought a package but forgot that I also needed Italian sausage to stuff them with…so back to the store, I went. Whew, they had that in stock.
Problem 3: It wasn’t a problem, well maybe it was. We had an angel food cake mix in the pantry and I knew it would be delish and it was very easy to make. The Betty Crocker mix expired in July 2018, no worries, how can flour expire? When I was kid, we had never heard of expiration dates. Rock on and use it before it goes bad!
Problem #4, which aligns with Problem 3, was that I didn’t have an angel food cake pan. I owned three in Boise (along with at least 15 regular cake pans), but had sent them to the Good Will because the cowboy said he had every kind of pan on Earth, and I should not bring more. He lied. He has every kind of pan on Earth, EXCEPT an angel food cake pan. Of course, the local store had none, and I didn’t want to drive to Billings, so I improvised and put it in a round pan, sort of like a Bundt pan, and baked it. Bake forty-five minutes, the package said, but it took double that time and an hour and a half later, I pried it from the pan. It was not burned, but rather crispy and flat, well, I don’t really mean “rather” because it was flat as a pancake. I snitched a bite, and it tasted okay, although a little bit chewy.
“Wow, this is good! Just like Mama used to make,” Cowboy said, “Daddy called it an Oklahoma cherub cake, you know, like a small flat angel. It will be great, slap some of those blueberries on it with some whipped cream and call it Gail’s Delightful Cherub.” Our guests loved it and maybe I will enter one of those cooking shows.
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PS: For the summer…I’m traveling and working on a book. I will be writing blogs only for Tuesday!
The Wrinkly Bits series:
Cruise Time
Out of Time
Wasting Time
Flash of Time!!! New book!
Bits of Time
