Family of Excess

About 8pm tonight, I received an info flash from a friend informing me of an unadvertised special for strawberries on sale only until midnight, so I immediately put shoes on and pealed out in search of a bargain. Good for me AND good for Kroger. I found $85 worth of bargains! Now, my kitchen is covered up (until morning when my feet don't hurt as much) with Hershey's chocolate chips marked down to $.79 a bag (and freeze well) with other good deals I ran across. I also have buckets of grapefruit and lemons as the grandkids and I "harvested" the trees today, before the substantial freeze supposedly comes on Thursday night. It helps that the weather was just glorious... cool, with the sun shining brightly... what I like to call a "Sears & Roebuck day" (because you couldn't order a better one from a catalog). I had to climb a tall ladder to accomplish the deed ....I don't do heights well ... now I look like I've been hangin' out with Brer Rabbit in the briar patch from the thorns on the grapefruit tree, but the kids were fun and kept laughing and hugging each other and expressing their love for everyone while they were gathering the citrus... a little bit of heaven. So between Kroger and harvesting, we look like a family of excess. Today, I guess we are!

I read in Lisa's blog about my sixteen month old grandbaby, Amelia enjoying a banana, quietly and stratigically smearing it all over the place. It made me smile and brought to my mind the memory of a similar event some years ago with Amelia's daddy, Aaron. Its been well over ten years and it STILL makes me laugh.
My husband, Mike and I were relaxing in the living room of our home while our teenage son was out of sight, in the kitchen, concocting a delicious chocolate malt in the blender, as he often did. We heard the whirring of the blender, and then suddenly a loud crash, followed first by silence, then a sheepish chuckle when asked if he was okay. He said he was. If I live to be a hundred, I will never forget the sight I took in when I got to the kitchen to see what happened. Aaron, standing in front of the sink, absolutely dripping with malt, including his glasses (it looked like he desperately needed a tiny set of windshield wipers, like you might see in a cartoon). As I surveyed the area, it seemed like the blender had simply exploded, with droplets of malt on every wall and in every nook and cranny you could see with the naked eye. Malt was in places where most people don't even HAVE places!! Apparently, you really SHOULDN'T put a knife blade into a glass blender while in motion. That's how you know "experience is the best teacher" because you get the test first, and THEN you get the lesson. I am not exaggerating when I tell you that even a year later, I was still finding malt hiding where it had found its way that evening. So, Baby Amelia got it honest.

I should confess that I am not exempt from making a mess myself. A short time ago I was asked to make homemade rolls for a dinner. With my handy dandy Kitchen Aid, it is just as easy to quadruple the recipe as it is to make a single recipe (and again, they freeze well) so I made up the dough and set it in the oven (out of a draft) to rise. My brother wanted me to ride with him to my sister's house a half hour away so I told him I would, but that we'd have to get right back so I could finish the rolls. (I have 5 siblings who all live locally except one - the stinker lives in Yorba Linda, CA but the rest of us get to run around together often. I know, I am so lucky!) Anyway, you know things always take longer than you think they will, but I felt confident that if I needed to, I could always just punch the dough down and let it rise an extra time, so when we got back and I looked in the oven, I had not counted on the fact that the dough had risen all the way up to the top of the oven, including being tangled in the broiling coil and brackets, etc. What a mess! I felt like saying every bad word I knew and making up a few, but I didn't. There was nothing left to do but proceed to scrape and coax the dough out the best I could but it was at such an awkward height, I couldn't really stand up straight and sitting down was out of the question. You will be happy to know that when it was all said and done, I only lost about a cup of dough that I couldn't use. Seems weird, doesn't it? Its like when you find a tissue in the washer that you didn't know was in the pocket of your clothes.... how can a tissue be so tiny when you use it to blow your nose and so HUGE when you find it in the wash? I hate it when that happens! The moral of that story is that I won't be leaving my dough to rise for an extended period of time ever again... at least not in the oven.