Monday Musings

We are starting Week 2 of our track out much like we started Week 1 — in our pajamas at 9:00 and an open calendar before us.  I’m enjoying the quiet pace.

We kicked off the weekend by attending the annual book sale put on by our public library.  I’d been meaning to go every year since we moved here because it seemed to be a pretty big deal but hadn’t made it for one reason or another.  This year I made a special effort to make it because a) my smartypants friend Heather was going and she knows fun when she sees it, and b) we’d had a bit much of togetherness in the house and the boys needed to see the outside world.

I spent the better part of two hours browsing the cooking and craft/hobby aisles and came out with a boatload of cookbooks to go with the bajillion I already have but at $4 a hardback and $2 for paperbacks, you can’t blame a girl for loading up.  The kids got in on the action picking up comic books, novels, and a couple of Japanese-English dictionaries.

JJ, you never disappoint.

And frequently amuse.

We took our haul home, settled the kids in with pizza, the remote, and several episodes of Phineas and Ferb on the DVR and Craig took me out for dinner to celebrate our 16th wedding anniversary.  He let me pick the place and I chose Machu Picchu, a new Peruvian place that recently opened in a nearby strip mall which also conveniently houses my local Jo-Ann Fabric store because I was hoping to sweet-talk him into stopping in for a quick perusal through the patterns when we were done.

The restaurant was small and unpretentious but the food was delicious and artfully presented.  We had the green tamale for an appetizer (I feel the same way about tamales as I do creme brûlée – if it’s on the menu, it’s on my plate) and for the entrée I had the lomo saltado and Craig had the chicken skewers with chimichurri sauce.  I think we’ll go back again, though, because everyone else was ordering fish and by the time I saw the 4th plate go by, I was panicking that I’d ordered the wrong thing.

We went home shortly after dinner and piled on the couch and watched TV with the kids for a little while and sent them to bed and within minutes heard the unmistakable sound of retching in the upstairs bathroom.

Turns out Tommy brought home something more than just a Captain Underpants book from the library sale.  Apparently they also threw in the Hurling Every Twenty Minutes virus for free.  What a delightful anniversary gift it was.

By Saturday, the throwing up had stopped but he had a raging fever and since it was clear we weren’t going anywhere for a while, we settled on the couch with our new reading material and within twenty minutes I became irrationally obsessed with the Thai cookbook I’d purchased.

“I WANT TO MAKE GREEN CURRY!” I declared to my family.  “I NEED GALANGAL! I NEED LEMONGRASS! I NEED TO GO TO THE ASIAN MARKET IMMEDIATELY!”

“Don’t they make the paste for that stuff in a little jar at Kroger?  Just use that.” said my husband, ever so logically.

“It’s not the same! Does the grandmother living in the rice paddy go to Kroger?  NO! She makes it from scratch! And so shall I!” I said in an understated sort of way.

So off we went to the sketchy Asian market that doesn’t have a health rating prominently posted anywhere and bought ingredients on sight alone because there wasn’t a whole lot of English spoken in the place and my pantomime skills just aren’t what they used to be.

And you can only imagine the smile on Craig’s face when the store owner (who did speak English) asked me why I was buying all of that stuff and I proudly said  “I’m making green curry from scratch” and she LAUGHED OUT LOUD and said, “Why don’t you just buy the jar of green curry paste from the grocery store?  That’s what we all do.”

*sigh*

 

And then I went home, UNDETERRED, and spent the afternoon making homemade spring rolls…

grinding spices (after sending Craig to two stores to find dried Keffir lime leaves and whole cumin seeds because the ones I bought had been mislabeled and turned out to be fennel)….

and simmering a green chicken curry that would I hope would make a Thai grandmother weep (for joy! for joy!).

And it only took four hours and $38 and I could have had it in 20 minutes and for $3.59 from the little green jar at Kroger.

Have a nice day.