Cooking with Julie (and Friends)

I know I make fun of my cooking skills a lot here on the blogs--but I just want you to know--not nearly enough as I could. I see lack of interest, skill and native talent as my main obstacles to cookery success. Looking back on my years of culinary mishaps, I am reminded of one of my mottoes: Those who can, do, and those who can't are to be made fun of. So in the spirit of good-natured mocking, let's take a little stroll through the last week--Kitchen Edition:

Friday is always pizza night. Usually we just purchase some cheap and barely edible frozen pizzas at the grocery. The kids don't seem to care and it keeps Pie and myself from eating too much. But every few weeks I will get industrious and decide to make homemade pizza. Last Friday I gathered all my fixins and made up a triple batch of dough. The kitchen was cold so I turned on the top oven for 1 minute, turned it off and then put the whole bowl of dough in to rise in comfort. About 3 minutes later I realized I should start preheating the oven while the dough was rising and so I cranked that thing up to 500 degrees and walked away. Yeah. Same oven the dough was in. I realized this about 20 minutes later--to my horror. There was the oven at a blistering 500. There was the hot bowl of dough--mind you, covered in plastic wrap-- with the top of the dough a golden brown. I know negative self-talk is wrong, but I think even Stuart Smiley would have been in agreement with my "I'm an idiot. I'm an idiot. I'm an idiot." inner dialog.

Inside this hard shell of cooked bread there was a raw, lava-like center. I salvaged what I could, patting the dough into the pizza pans. We carried on and you know what? It was some of the worst pizza I've ever made.

Sunday morning, two days later, we are running late as usual for our 8:30 church and just before we leave I spend all of 2 minutes grabbing 7 potatoes from the pantry, stabbing each one 3 times with a fork and then throwing them into the oven. We have this meal a lot on Gymnastics day. The potatoes cook while we are away and it is a quick meal to throw together when we get home. So, it's not like I am unfamiliar with the baking of potatoes. I do usually wrap the potatoes in aluminum foil, but there was no time for that on Sunday. Three hours later we come home to a house that smells strongly of French fries. I open the oven to behold:

I think Sid explained it best by saying the potatoes (what was left of them) looked like hatched dinosaur eggs. Out of the seven potatoes, only two did not explode. The insides were splattered in layers all over the inside of the oven, just like hash browns. I'm sure it must have been a spectacular site when the potato bombs were bursting in air....we're sorry we missed it. Another look at the oven, after it had been tidied up a bit......thank goodness for self-cleaning ovens.

Last night (Friday pizza night again) we had some friends from way back in the Moorpark days visit with their kids. Robb and Katie (Lewis) Holmstead and four of their 5 boys were in town for a baby blessing and spent the evening with our crew. It was so fun! We were sad to miss out on their oldest, Christopher, who had to stay behind in Pleasant Grove, but we hung out with the other boys Nathan, Joseph, Ryan and Scott. Just like when we had the Menzies and the Walkers over previously, the evening was perfect and one would never know there were 10 kids under one roof. Well, only 9 kids last night-- 8 of them boys! I made pizza again. It is my feeding-an-army meal. The pizza turned out perfectly but at one point the oven door locked and wouldn't let us get out the last pizza. Crazy! And just when I was starting to panic the thing opened. My diagnosis? Haunted oven. Of course you know something had to go wrong in the kitchen, and last night it was my tried and true peach cobbler recipe. I put too much melted butter on the top. It was like butter soup. If you are like me and have always held the belief that there is no such thing as too much butter, guess what? Too much butter is real. It is real like haunted ovens.

Some pictures! Sid, Nathan, Jon, Joseph, Little Scott, Josie, Ryan, Katie, Tommy, me and Calvin.

The crazy picture. The only time the kids were wild last night.
The grownups. There were two kids taking pictures (thus our divided focus) and all the kids were standing in the background being silly, telling us to smile.

We had such fun with the Holmsteads. It was a reunion 13+ years in the making and it was delightful to see Robb and Katie again and meet their sweet boys--what a great family!