Domesticity

I have been out of work for one week now and I have been a cooking machine. We have been in our house for 3.5 years and I usually ran the dishwasher once a week, maybe twice. This week I have been running it almost twice a day I have been cooking so much. I currently have banana bread in the oven, I made pancakes from scratch the other day. I always thought it must be hard to make pancakes hence why they have box recipes, but no, not really. Maybe it takes 5 more minutes to prepare, but in the grand scheme of making breakfast, not a big deal. They were also pretty amazing pancakes. I made lasagna for Adam and I on Christmas (which isn't really that hard, but still...) with some glazed carrots and sesame ginger green beans. Both made from fresh veggies. Our normal dinners include some sort of frozen, pre-seasoned, steam in the bag veggies. Those are fine to have on hand, but it's nice to cook with fresh ingredients. I also made some deviled eggs for the first time. They are surprisingly not as complicated as I thought they were. Of course I brought them to a family gathering where someone else also made deviled eggs. I really don't know what people did without the internet for recipes. I can type in the most generic terms and find what I want. Love it.

Adam and I have one more Christmas gathering, it was postponed due to illness of the host, but I've volunteered to make the desert for it. I've decided to make cheesecake cupcakes of different flavors. I have a basic recipe, and now that I know the difference between confectioners sugar and powdered sugar (as in there is no difference) they should turn out a little bit better this time around. But I'm going to add some raspberries, chocolate and caramel to the basic recipe and hopefully my variations will be a success. If all else fails, I will make Adam's favorite cupcake recipe that I just got last weekend from his mom. They are chocolate cupcakes with a cream cheese filling. I found a recipe online awhile ago, but they never tasted the same as his mom's. She gave me the recipe and the difference was the chocolate used. I was using a cocoa powder and she used nesquik. Yes, the stuff used for chocolate milk. Who knew such a minor change could make such a difference.

My family found out a couple weeks ago that my uncle Terry, the one we always take bowling, has throat cancer. Terry thought he had strep for almost a year before he found out that wasn't it. He went into the hospital last week because he was having difficulty breathing, he got a tracheotomy this morning. His cancer is so far along, that if he didn't have the surgery soon it would constrict his airways in a matter of weeks. He's in recovery now, so we'll see how things go. He is an avid smoker, but he's actually doing pretty well not being able to smoke. The next steps are going to be chemo and radiation, but we're not sure if Terry is going to be up for it. Again, we're just going to have to see how things go.

Hope everyone had a good holidays... happy new year!