Another Food Weekend

As a family, we shut ourselves in for most of the weekend, having been quite tired of engaging the public over the past few weeks. Our lives after work have been busy with kid engagements, charity functions and meetings, helping friends out, extended family stuff, etc., so we dug into the house like a tick and refused to come out much for a couple of days.

I started out the weekend with a trip to the grocery store and made a big batch of homemade mac and cheese from a recipe my mom gave me a few years ago. It's the one she always used when I was a kid. I have been making a big push to not use mixes anymore. Boxed mac and cheese is absolutely disgusting and likely has more in common with motor oil than cheese. When I make things from scratch, I can cut out a lot of the crap I can't pronounce from the outside of the box along with the salt content.

Saturday morning, I knocked out a batch of scratch-made drop biscuits and gravy. I received a Lodge cast iron drop biscuit pan from my in-laws for Christmas and I'd been itching to try it out. The biscuits came out great and we ate the extras throughout the weekend.

Saturday afternoon I made a batch of chili. The same recipe I won an office chili contest with a couple months ago, only I toned down the heat considerably. I also made a key lime pie for dessert. My first attempt at pie, making one or even eating one. I'm notoriously weird about food, so this was a big deal. We ate it and drank Moscow Mules out by the backyard fire pit that evening with our neighbor Bob.

Sunday, up bright an early. watched some cartoons with the kiddo for a bit, drank some pour-over coffee from the Hario V60 coffee maker and waited for the Mrs. to rise and shine. When she got up, I pawned the kid off on her and made some scratch Belgian waffles. My first time not using Bisquick to make them. I cut the box out of my pancakes a few months ago, but hadn't had the chance to on waffles just yet. They were considerably better than the off-the-shelf variety.

I also got a little done on the rowing peapod model. I'm about three ribs deep on lashing it up. With eleven lashings per rib, it's going a little slow.

It's weird how similar cooking is to boat building in my mind. If you can follow a simple recipe, you can build a boat. Like making food, a boat is just a series of smaller tasks that eventually add up to something greater.