Do y’all ever have days when your head simply spins?
And not the kind of spins that you get from ALL THE GOOD THINGS, like a decent plum wine and carnival rides, but the kind of spins which come from JUST TOO MUCH of JUST TOO MANY THINGS.
Although why I listed riding a Tilt-a-Whirl in the parking lot of a major shopping center in the middle of summer when it’s 107 degrees outside (which is also known as A CARNIVAL, people) as something that could be GOOD is beyond me. With the onset of a little thing called AGE, my opinions about the carnivals have changed.
Carnivals = Head Spins = Immediate, Prolonged Puking = Mama Just Needs To Go To Bed
Enough said.
Honestly, though, I feel like my December Plate has been heaped entirely too high, and I’m almost unable to carry it to the table, where I can set it down and plan out a strategy for attacking it with a fork.
I think the icing on the cake happened yesterday, when I made homemade spaghetti sauce.
Because I do have my standards, people. My mama never used jarred spaghetti, so I wasn’t even aware that Ragu existed until college, and then I was PLUM SHOCKED! I just had no idea that sauce came in a little glass jar with some words paying homage to Italy. Traditions are a hard thing to break, so I make the spaghetti sauce the old-fashioned way EACH AND EVERY TIME WE EAT SPAGHETTI at the Jedi Manor. The boy knows no jarred tomato sauce for HIS pasta noodles!
Truly, it is a labor of love for my family, but I’m living proof that no amount of festive Bing Crosby songs blaring out of the iPod, which should have set a soothing atmosphere for me to cook in, can make me ENJOY ALL THE CHOPPING AND THE BROWNING.
No, ma’am.
But I persevered yesterday morning, and I chopped peppers and onions and garlic. I browned sausage and ground turkey. I measured spices and cut tomatoes. I stirred, and I sprinkled a healthy serving of LOVE right onto the top of that sauce, and then I clamped the lid to the slow cooker down and set it all to LOW.
And our house smelled LOVELY! JUST FLAT-OUT LOVELY! OH, SO LOVELY! all day long.
And then, just before dinner, I used a small spoon to taste the sauce, just to make sure that all the spices had blended nicely, and that I could still pass myself off as a great Italian woman who doesn’t speak a single Italian word beyond FETTUCCINE, and who has no Italian roots in her family tree whatsoever.
But I can make the sauce!
So there I was, with a spoon suspended over our kitchen sink, blowing on it JUST SO, because sweet mercy! A good sauce packs some heat. And then, when I thought it had cooled sufficiently, I popped the bite of sauce into my mouth…
…and cauterized my gums, melted my tongue to the side of my cheek, and burned a hole from the roof of my mouth into my sinus cavity. I’m pretty sure I have third-degree burns; I know that I have extensive blistering, and if I raise my tongue to the roof of my mouth, I can stick it out my left nostril.
I skipped the spaghetti last night, people. Once you’ve bitten the top off of a live grenade, you become a bit gun shy. Besides, my taste buds were nothing but blackened ash flakes clinging to the end of my tongue, so the spaghetti sauce would have had zero-point-zero flavor for me.
Hubs and the boy assured me that the sauce — ONCE IT COOLED! — was sensational. I had to take their word for it.
So, with a sore mouth and a feeling that homemade spaghetti sauce may be completely dead to me now, I am looking forward to our weekend.
I’m hoping that I can schedule a solid fifteen minutes to sit in my yoga pants and do some deep breathing, so I can recharge the batteries to keep digging into that full plate of mine.
Have a great Thursday evening.