Lauren

I’ve been on a baking kick lately, but haven’t taken photos of the process. I do have a couple of baking stories. This one is about Costco’s chicken bake.

The Costco food court is a pretty good deal, but their chicken bake is my favorite. It’s a giant log of chicken-bacon filling inside pizza dough, held together with Caesar salad dressing. when Lloyd and I go to Costco, we get one and split it.

aeWell, the internet says you can make a pretty good copycat recipe, so I made some dough, cut up some chicken and bacon, used parmesan cheese (because that’s what I had), and the Caesar salad dressing that I couldn’t believe was in the fridge. Who uses that stuff anyway?

I rolled it up, sprinkled cheese on it and popped it in the oven. Then I looked at that bottle of dressing.

It expired in 2021.

I exclaimed over the grossness, but we ate it anyway. It was pretty good. I’ve never had Caesar dressing on its own, so I am hoping the tanginess is part of the original flavor, not the result of being expired for two years.

(We survived, and it was actually pretty good.)

If you haven’t read yesterday’s vitamin story, go do that first.

The problem with having a wood stove is the installation. The place I’d like to put it is in the shed, but that involves cutting holes and committing to a layout inside. My current daydreams involve making a bay-window-type bump out and running the stove pipe up through that.

But…….that’s so much work…….

I looked into free-standing alcohol stoves and found this:

It burns a special kind of alcohol, and it sure ticks off a lot of boxes! Free-standing, so I could move it around if needed, it actually gets warm from fire (you have to have good ventilation so you don’t die), no need to cut holes in the shed, and…. cheap! The fuel is expensive though, and – remember – I hadn’t taken all my vitamins.

I didn’t buy it. Some reviews said the paint was poorly done and chips off. But, the idea was in my head. I have some cans of gelled alcohol fuel that I’ve messed with in the shed, but surely I had something…..

I do.

I’ve had a Perfection kerosene heater for forever. You’ve seen it before. It looks like this:

Well, there are NO photos of the several-day process to cut a hole in the side. Let’s just say that Lauren did lots and lots of unsafe things that should never be done by untrained humans, especially Lauren. No major wounds were suffered, and there were a few bouts of regret, but the uneven cuts are just part of its charm:

I think it has a real ‘Beauty and the Beast’ look to it – like it might come to life and sing about metalworking safety or something.

Anyway, it works great. I rigged up some metal rods to hold the bottom of the fuel can that fits in the hole inside. Here’s a short video of its test run. (There are skewers holding the can – it was in deep prototype phase.)

So, the moral is: Lauren saved a bunch of money AND didn’t have to get stitches for anything.

Remind me to finish those vitamins.

I finished a bottle of vitamins! Granted, they were children’s chewable vitamins so it wasn’t like I was choking them down, but I’d often forget. I think this bottle has been around a looooong time.

I was happy because that meant I could buy another bottle! But then…… I noticed that I still had another bottle of boring, grown-up vitamins.

Ugh. Who wants to take those? However, I am trying to not be so wasteful, so I counted them out to see how long it would take to finish them.

As it turns out, if I take one a day I should be finished by the beginning of May. I’d need some sort of motivation, though, so I wrote this on the bottle:

See? I even gave myself enough grace to skip a bunch of days, and since I obsess about tiny wood stoves, this is the carrot on the stick I need to actually do something about it!

It’s been working pretty well. Having the bottle right by my coffee cups is a good reminder, except for the mornings when I unload the dishwasher and just grab a mug from there. Eh, nobody’s perfect.

As it turns out, the wood stove might not be necessary……… (that’s tomorrow’s story)

Hi! Remember me? I have some stories to tell you over the next couple of days, and I’m going to sit down and write them all. (It’s Sunday morning. Lloyd has been fighting a cold for several days and is staying in bed. I went to a wonderful funeral yesterday and that’s my church attendance for the weekend, so I’m not a total slacker.)

Let’s see, I’m going to tell you about:

• Vitamins and fire
• The new fire thing
• Chicken Bake
• Raspberry rolls
• Lloyd’s photo
• The Coat Story

But first, let me ask you if you’ve seen my car key. It’s been missing for quite a while, but since I haven’t been driving anywhere in the car without Lloyd, or I’m driving the truck, it hasn’t been an issue. It was last definitely located the first weekend in February. Anyone? Anyone?

I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Preamble: It’s important to the story to know that our ‘medicine drawer’ was in a secret, low, under-cabinet drawer that’s hard to get to.

So, The Project started because after my last round of sickness, Lloyd said, “Maybe we shouldn’t keep all the medicine so close to the floor, now that we’re getting older.” My creaky joints and I were totally on board with that, along with figuring out where all the other stuff would be better stored. For instance, we keep extra soap, deodorant and toothpaste in the other under-cabinet drawer – the one that now we know the furnace is cooking throughout the winter (thanks, thermal camera).

So, on Sunday, I did NOT take a ‘before’ photo of the process because it was too shameful and embarrasing. I took two folding tables into the bathroom and we pulled EVERYTHING out of the cabinets, doing some preliminary sorting and tossing. (An hour into this was when we discovered we were late to church.)

Later in the day there was more sorting and tossing, and further subdividing of stuff. We wanted to see what kind of totes/bins we might need, but honestly – we had almost everything already. The only thing to buy was something to hold the various kinds of medicine/first aid stuff.

We bought some bins at Dollar General, and they’re going to work out just fine.

So, here is both the ‘before’ and also the ‘after’ of the room.

See? Looks just the same. But, the guts are different:

I still have some sorting of my own stuff to do, but at least I can easily get to the ibuprofen when I get sore and tired.

So many things went sideways on Sunday before 10:00, it was pretty funny.

It started at 4:30 a.m. I woke with a start – fairly sure that I had perhaps left the dishwasher on at school. (I don’t do the dishes often anymore, so I am out of that routine.) Rather than lay in bed and wonder about it for the next couple of hours, I just drove over there and checked. Good news! It was off. Bonus: I had a very early Council Fire that was done by 5:30.

With all this extra time, I started on our next Project: rearranging the stuff in our bathroom so that the medicine isn’t in a drawer right by the floor. (There’s a whole other story about this in another post.) I got a good start, then Lloyd got up, showered and dressed, and helped me. We worked like what seemed was forever, but at 7:45, I looked at the clock. A while later, I looked at the clock: 7:45. “It seems like it’s been this time forever. What’s the real time?” Lloyd checked his phone. “It’s 8:26. Church starts in four minutes.”

Stupid stopped clock! I jumped out of my pajamas and into church clothes and we tore out of the house.

So, we were late to church, but it’s all fine. We sang hymns, heard the sermon (long), then Concordia’s women’s’ chorus sang for the offertory. Somewhere around me, I heard a faint crackling and a faint voice, but I figured someone behind me was messing with their phone.

Nope…… it was me. I accidentally called my Dad on my watch. Oy. Sorry, everyone…..

So, home to eat, nap, have a family Zoom, then finish The Project. (That’s for tomorrow.)