I have a friend (who shall remain nameless) who used to say when he was hungry: "I need food! F-U-D, food!"
Unfortunately for my long suffering wife, I picked that expression up and have used it often in the decades when she has provided for my appetite.
I have written here before that in recent years she has grown "sick and tired" of the kitchen and has fairly often relinquished it to me to provide for myself.
I can turn out a pretty good Friday night pizza, even though it comes from the store frozen and all I do is doctor it a little.
But yesterday Her Nibs decided to make Sunday dinner and it was a huge success.
And all done on one sheet pan!
Regrettably my appetite overcame my common sense and I did not get a photograph of the finished meal.
What I did get was a photograph of the meal about to go into the oven, right after Her Majesty said, "That looks darned near good enough to eat right now!"
There was a pork tenderloin, mini-peppers, some undefined green peppers from our garden plants, a passel of halved mini-potatoes, some halved yellow squash (also from our back yard), and some quartered onions.
I wish I could show you a photo of the meal on my plate but the closest I could come would be to show you my mid-section and since this is a family blog I choose to forego that.
Suffice it to say it was delicious.
So today I announced to the Royal Companion that I would be spending my day baking.
To begin, she needed a couple of fresh loaves of English Muffin Bread, which I have grown to be good at.
As usual, it came out brown and beautiful.
I'm a little curious, though, what it will be like once she slices it tomorrow.
(I leave the slicing to her ever since I found out that I am incapable of slicing bread in a straight line.)
But I'm curious because I found out later that I had measured the five cups of flour that goes into this concoction with a 3/4 cup measure instead of the one-cup measure the recipe calls for.
By my calculation that means they were one-and-a-quarter cups of flour . . . light!
Now the loaves look and feel exactly the same but we are both anxious to see what the inside looks like.
But leaving idiocy and carelessness aside, I plunged on into my next project - Sour Cream Blueberry Scones.
I made scones once before and recall the memory as a messy and unforgiving attempt at what I would call Foolish Cookery.
This was no exception.
There was flour everywhere, especially on me.
I might add that I own a very nice black with white pin-stripes chef's apron but, like today, I forget that it hangs just feet from me in a closet.
But all that being said the finished scones, though somewhat messy in appearance, were delicious.
And finally I turned to one of those rip-off recipes one finds all over the Interwebs, this one titled Copycat Olive Garden Breadsticks.
Everyone loves those breadsticks, right?
I remember going to dinner once with the wife of a friend (no, it was completely on the up-and-up!) who shocked me by asking our waiter when he brought the notoriously buttery breadsticks to the table . . . for some extra butter!
Could be she and her husband, my late friend, ate that way all the time.
He died many years ago of a sudden fatal heart attack in the kitchen of his home.
My breadsticks today were . . okay.
They're not perfectly symmetrical like the breadsticks from Olive Garden but they tasted about the same.
I got one of those eye-rolling "Oh, really" looks from my Lord and Keeper when I said I thought the restaurant must have some kind of machine rolling device to make theirs so perfect.
So anyway my day in the Taylor Family Bakery is over and done with and tonight's vodka tastes particularly good.
And my take on the life of a baker?
It's DRUDGERY!
FREAKIN' DRUDGERY!
Not fit work for an 81 year old slacker.
