December 8, 2011

Outside Temp: 19 F (it was 1 degree this morning, when I sent the kids to school!)

What I cooked today:
Beef Stew: We had some tri-tip in the freezer from about 2 months ago, and Connor had been asking for beef stew.  So easy! 

Biscuits: So, I'm really feeling like a bad cook lately.  The recipe called for 3 oz of butter or shortening.  I looked at the number on the stick of butter, and put in 3.  Of course, as anyone would know, the number refers to the number of tablespoons.  There are 4 oz in 8 tablespoons in a stick of butter.  Which means my biscuits had 1/2 the correct amount of butter.  Needless to say, they were awful.  Patrick said they were kind of like a scone.  No amount of honey would make them edible.  Oh well.

Chocolate Chip Cookies: Connor has a bake sale tomorrow at school.  They are donating all the money raised for the local women's shelter.  So, he asked me to make my chocolate chip cookies.  Of course, with the first batch, I managed to burn half of them.  I should just stop trying to cook now.  The second half was fine.  But I'm not looking forward to whatever I have to make next Tuesday for Katie's class's bake sale...

Update:
We had a nice, relaxing day at home.  We went to church for the feast day of Immaculate Conception, which was kind of cool.  The homily was about the 'Prevenient Grace' or the grace of God to keep you from doing something bad.  We all know about the grace of forgiveness or the grace of peace, but we never really talk about Prevenient Grace.  I tend to believe that this is the best and most important blessing that God gives us... the thing that stops us before doing something we will regret later. 

Which made me think of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  You remember whenever one of the kids would do something bad, Mr. Wonka would stand back and say 'stop.  please.  don't do that'.  He wouldn't yell or shout.  And he wouldn't forcibly stop them from doing bad things.  He would just tell them they shouldn't do it, and allow them to make their own decisions.  I remember Charlie turning to Grandpa Joe and asking "Why don't they listen to Mr. Wonka?".   I love it when Mass makes me think.  :)

Ryan went with us to Mass (it was in the middle of the day, so the other kids were at school).  Most of the time, Ryan just yammers through church, which involves a whole lot of 'shushing' from us.  Today, was no exception, up until we started the 'Our Father'.  That was when he started to say it with us, in his loud voice.  Which would have been just cute and endearing, except that he was a half a line behind the rest of us, like he was repeating us.  I struggled between laughing, and trying to stay with the rest of the church, and trying not to be on the same line as he was.  Fortunately, there was only about 15 people in the church and they are also so sweet, they just turned to us and smiled. 

The kids have all had a little bit of a cough lately, so we decided to skip sledding.  But, tomorrow is Friday, so I'm assuming that snow play will occur.  And the slopes open tomorrow, so Saturday will probably have more snow involved.  I'm still debating getting up on skis.  Right now, I'm leaning towards the 'no', but you never know how things will turn out.