Remember a couple of weeks ago when I was all, “I need to lose weight and I’m starting after Thanksgiving”? Yeah, not so much.
I guess that’s not really true. I am sitting in the library munching on cucumber slices, after all. It’s just that I got so many fun toys involving food for Christmas from Joe’s family that I feel like I need to use them. I mean, really. You can’t give a girl a silicone rolling pin, cookie cutters, and a silpat and expect her to NOT make cookies, can you?
I didn’t think so.
And that’s exactly what I did. I made sugar cookies Monday night. I was going to roll them out and cut out fun Star Wars shapes, but I decided that the time the dough needed to chill in the fridge was simply too long to wait for the sugary goodness. And the frosting. Oh my god. Whoever invented buttercream frosting is on my list. You know. The list.
I decided to be a good homemaker for once in my life and made pasta and warmed up some of the sauce I made a few weeks ago. When Joe got home from teaching a ComedySportz workshop, I had a delicious dinner, complete with frosted cookies for dessert, waiting for him.
If that wasn’t enough, I rinsed all of the dishes and put them in the dishwasher. I cleaned up the cookie making mess (because cookies just don’t taste as good if you don’t make a mess while putting all of those ingredients together!). I put the extra cookie dough and buttercream frosting in the fridge so I could make more cookies later (I’ve been good and haven’t touched either one since. I don’t know how much longer I can hold out). Then I got out the crock pot and put together all of the ingredients for Tuesday’s dinner.
Pot roast.
Joe’s favorite thing.
Besides the sauce.
I mean, for real. What’s not to love about a huge chunk of delicious beef, marinated in two kinds of soup, with succulent root vegetables, that has cooked on low heat for eight hours until it is fall-apart-when-you-pick-it-up tender? That’s right. Nothing.
To go with the heavenly main dish, I made salads for both of us, each one containing only the vegetables we like, I even shredded my own carrots, and decided to put some crescent rolls in the oven. You need something to mop up the pot roast gravy, right? Since it was late and I didn’t have much time, I had to skip making the rolls from scratch and just rolled the crescents from a tube onto my baking sheet while I was waiting for the oven to heat up.
After I turned on the oven, I started to hear this weird sizzling noise. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from and dismissed it as the crazy cats doing something they weren’t supposed to. Again. About ten seconds later I started to smell something sweet and realized what that sound was.
The cookies. My yummy, frosted rounds of sugary goodness.
Monday night, after I had frosted the cookies, I left them on the cooling rack so they were within easy reach for dessert. After dinner, to keep the cookies out of reach from the cats while we were watching TV, I stuck that cooling rack in the oven so the frosting didn’t get ruined by packing them in a food storage container. The sound I was hearing was the frosting melting over the edges of my cookies and splattering on the oven floor.
I opened the oven as fast as I could, somehow remembered that pot holders are a good idea when removing metal cooling racks from a hot oven, and got those cookies on the counter where they would be safe. I briefly considered trying to clean up the rapidly burning drops of frosting from the oven floor, and decided there was too much hot in there to worry about it. Not long after, the kitchen started to fill up with smoke and I had to turn on the fan and open a window because the smell was awful.
The good news is the cookies survived (and are only a little bit crunchy. The only evidence that anything ever went wrong in their short lives), I was able to make the crescent rolls — which turned out as buttery and flaky as any crescent roll ever could — and Joe never would have known anything out of the ordinary had happened in the kitchen if I hadn’t left the window open until he got home from work.
I guess that was someone’s way of reminding me I’m supposed to be eating healthy now. It only kind of worked, whoever you are, because now I feel the need to eat every single one of those little cookies just so they know they’re still loved.
Even if they are a little brown around the edges now.
Through Katie's Eyes 