Weekend Plans Post: Pasketti
We’re fixing to do the Quarterly Birthday Celebration. Get Mom and Sis’s family and Maribou all in the same place and eat a meal, exchange presents, avoid unpleasant topics, and have a goodish time. Sometimes we do Uno, a couple of times we did One Night Ultimate Werewolf, sometimes I played games with the boys on the Xbox in the basement.
Well, Mom’s getting older and her knee is bugging her more than it used to and so my sister said that mom is no longer going to be in charge of cooking for family events. The house that Maribou and I have is perfect for having one person over for a visit and it’s fine for two people to visit if they’re dating.
Three people is right out.
My sister’s house, however, is one of those gimungous houses that you see on reality television. If you look out the living room window, you see a beautiful vista of Pike’s Peak. So that means that we have family dinner at my sister’s. When the sun goes down, it shines directly into everybody’s eyes. And we’ve done that for a couple of years now. Well, it recently came out that the sister vaguely resents that she does all of the work for the various family gatherings.
I realized: Yeah. You know what? I have been slacking. Sure, I brought dessert over… but I should *COOK* for them.
So this weekend is the family gathering. We’re going over to Mom’s and I am taking over Mom’s kitchen. We’re going to make Mom sit in her rocker and watch The Waltons or Frasier or something while I get the spaghetti going.
Well, on Friday night, I’m going to go over to her place with my crock pot and start the recipe for my Colorado Style Spaghetti Sauce. I’ll do it up to the point where it says “let it sit in the fridge overnight”.
On Saturday, earlyish, I’m going to go over and add the hamburger meat to the sauce and continue the recipe.
And then, around 4ish, we’re going to go over there and do the family dinner thing. The side will be caesar salad and oven-baked bread. Sis is bringing dessert. And then we’ll exchange presents, avoid unpleasant topics, and have a goodish time. Cleanup shouldn’t be too bad, I’ll send leftovers home with anybody who wants some and then take the crock pot home to sleep for a while and say to myself “I should make some more of that sauce for the pizzas I want to bake”.
And so maybe I’ll make more next week too.
Sunday, of course, will be spent reeling from having my hour stolen. How I hate it.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is “snoring”. Photo taken by Maribou.)
I’ve begun hosting a potluck and board game night every second Saturday. RSVP’d this time around is Our Tod and his charming, clever bride. I have a board came called Mysterium still in its shrink-wrap, another RSVP’d guest is bringing Sagrada, and a third non-RSVP is bringing Viticulture. There is a kegful of homebrew, five cases of wine, and a lovely cocktail from some south-of-Seattle distillers. Then Sunday night I catch the redeye back east to spend a week with my Boomers. Ought to be a pretty full time.Report
Oh, Mysterium is a blast. I’ve never heard of Sagrada or Viticulture though. Googling now!
Omg, Viticulture looks amazing…Report
Viticulture looks fun; we have it’s cousin Agricola and enjoy the coopetition style for family games.Report
I desperately want someone to live-blog your sister’s reactions to having you cook in “her” kitchen! 😀
I would pay good money just to get people to stop fishing around with our clocks, too. Please just pick one and stick to it!
Weekend plans include maybe going to a friend’s house to finally pitch in and do my part to help brew some of the beer I’ve been enjoying for free for so long and going out to buy a new pair of hiking boots because one of my dogs had a very bad week and ate one of my boots!Report
Ha! That would never happen. I’m going to be cooking at Mom’s.
Poor doggie!Report
Spring break starts so today is a marathon day of trying to get caught up for systematic botany, then running home and throwing clothes in the washer. And then either tonight or tomorrow morning packing, and tomorrow night I board a train to go visit my mom for a couple days.
I probably need to read up and outline the various tribes of the Asteraceae while I am up there, though.Report
How in the heck is it spring break already?
Asteraceae? Oh! DAISIES!Report
I have a birthday that mathematically falls in Lent on all but the rarest occasions. When I’m lucky, it’s on Ash Wednesday. This year it was just mid-week Lent. So the weekend before we went out for a fancy dinner and this weekend (the one after) the kids will be summoned home and we’ll have a family dinner. Which, by the luck of the marital contract terms, means that I have to cook it. (Subsection XII: smoked meats.)
I’m also planning to try to recreate ‘real’ French Onion soup – which means slowly caramelizing more onions than you’d think and building that up slowly with beef demi. This is a soup that was in fashion, I dunno, 40 – 50 years ago when restaurants made this kind of thing. Over the years we became accustomed to quick versions that were, eh, good enough in a pinch – as long as you knew what you were missing. I want to get back what we’re missing because I’ve mostly forgotten, but I can tell that what we’re getting now as FO Soup *isn’t* FO soup. Like the substitute became the template and we’re now doing knock-offs of the knock-off. And…like other ‘simple’ foods such as Potato Skins that restaurants no longer do right for no good reason other than SYSCO says these are Potato Skins… we should just use the original recipe as the baseline so the short-cuts are realigned to the good again.Report
The restaurant made really good French Onion soup… looking back now, I’m pretty sure that regulators would say that we had to throw it out at the end of the day rather than refrigerate the leftover kettle and use it as a starting base for the next day’s soup. (Perpetual French Onion soup.)
But, seriously, that stuff was *GOOD*.Report
Yeah, there’s a genre of restaurant that I don’t see very much anymore outside of dives, a few ethnics and some Chicago family places that is still just scratch cooking for the masses.Report
A minor discovery. You know the song “Love Will Tear Us Apart”?
Joy Division.
This song came out in June 1980. There was a lot of malaise and this song caught a zeitgeist. Listening to it now? It’s almost a parody. “Now is the time on Sprockets when we dance!” Only British instead of German. *EAST* German.
And not bowlers and umbrellas British. East Enders British.
Well, a lot of stuff happened with Joy Division and not a whole lot of it is worth trying to be clever about. There was a *LOT* of tragedy involved with the days around the release of their first single. Given the tenor of the song, there was a lot of jokes about irony but, personally, I think that people who are having a lot of problems are likely to make a song about having a lot of problems.
Anyway, this song stood the test of time to the point where I was standing in the supermarket in 2019 asking “Why am I here in the middle of the bread aisle listening to Joy Division?”
Poor Ian Curtis.
Eventually, Francis Dunnery covered the song and, somehow, he turned it into a 1980 Malaise song into a…
I don’t even know how to describe it. It’s triumphant.
I hope Ian would have liked it.
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Anyway, as good as Dunnery’s cover of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” manages to be, it’s still not as good as Husker Du’s cover of Eight Miles High.
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I believe a major factor in keeping the song prominent (or at least more than just a Goth club mainstay) was it being featured in Donnie Darko.Report
Last night my lady friend and I had dinner with my sis and BIL. We 1st went to an Irish place but apparently St. Paddy’s Day is a week long now, so we ended up at the Italian place across the street.
Tonight it’s Vietnamese food and jazz at the Green Mill.Report