Friday :)

Delicious, delightful, blissful Friday...well, actually, it's soggy, gloomy, scary weather Friday; central Florida is enjoying penny-sized hail and winds in excess of 60 mph, and it's moving NNE. I'll take it...this has been the first Spring in a couple of years, where you don't smell smoke the minute you step outside your house.

Going back to work Friday after having Thursday off blows...yesterday was nice though, relaxing. Made a delicious meal (Chicken a La King on Pepperidge Farm puffers, with chocolate mousse for dessert), and we hung out in the bedroom and watched The Simpsons movie afterward. My chicken ala king is fairly low-maintenance, I cheat and use cream soups; but the mousse is from scratch from the Southern Living cookbook. I tweak it a little each time I make it (sometimes adding Kahlua, this time Bailey's Mint Chocolate Irish Cream), but boy, does it come out yummy and rich! And can someone tell me how I survived before Mom J gave me the Kitchenaid mixer? Whipping cream to soft peaks is an absolute breeze with that gem!

What we'll pay for convenience...was shopping for yesterday's meal at Winn-Dixie (because even though I can't stand them, I can't beat their prices usually), because they were advertising the boneless, skinless chicken breasts as BOGO (buy one, get one free). I'm not a fan of Sanderson Farms either (chicken brand in the south), but when you're desperate, you shove aside what you know about poultry production in favor of protein. But those SOBs at Sanderson Farms have started packaging the B/S chicken breasts in bigger amounts, and jacked up their per pound price, so that you're forced to shell out between $11 and $15 for a package of breasts. So I dug for the cheapest ones, walked around with them for awhile while picking up the other items I needed, and realized I wasn't going to have enough dough for everything (anniversary fell the day before payday this year, so we were pretty tapped). I went back to the chicken section, examined my options, and put the breasts back in favor of a whole bird for half the price. Had so much breast meat, I didn't have to dig into the legs and thighs. Definitely reinforced my desire to budget so I can do more shopping at Native Sun though; Sanderson Farms doesn't package their giblets, and shoving your hand inside a bird to extract organ meat is a thankless job. Another thankless job: deboning. We have a pressure cooker (marvelous invention), so the meat basically falls away from the bones when it's done, but shoving mushy skin aside to find the meat gives me the willies. I'll use utensils next time; I don't care if it makes me look like a girl!

Gonna have to make lists again, because I'd like to get some more stuff accomplished this weekend, and it's so easy for the time to fly by...want to do some more rearranging in bedroom and dining room, and some crafty work...would love to get that loom idea completed, and I'm definitely going to reacquaint myself with sewing in the coming weeks, learn different stitches and when they apply.