Friday Fail!

It's getting late, I'll bet you thought I failed!

Actually, I didn't have any failures this week, or, at least, not the kind I'm going to tell you about. There was a Fail last week, but it wasn't mine.

Last week, we were celebrating the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe with sopapillas and TMax was in the kitchen mixing them up. He's almost 13 and actually quite good in the kitchen. Smart boy. Knows how to read. Knows how to handle a mixer.



Well, maybe not so much on the reading. The recipe called for 4 cups of flour and 4 T of sugar. Now, I'm sure most of you can see that that said "4 Tablespoons" of sugar. Not teaspoons, which is the mistake he might have made as a novice chef. However, he read it as 4 CUPS of sugar!!

When he called me into the kitchen to add the liquid and roll out the dough, I (wisely, I might add) ran through the list of ingredients to double-check that he had added everything.

4 cups of flour?
Check.
4 tablespoons of sugar?
Check.
Ummmm, did you say tablespoons? I thought it said 4 CUPS!

After a long while and my mixing up a new batch of dough, he decided it was funny after all and said he'd let me use it on the blog. What a sweetheart!

So in the interest of frugality, we had a mixing bowl of flour, sugar, salt, and baking soda sitting on the counter for 4 days until I had time to figure out what I could do with it. Hitch want to bake chocolate chip cookies, so I had him do the math with the recipe so we could use it up. We had to triple the Toll House recipe to use all that flour and sugar. Even then it had more white sugar than brown, instead of equal parts. But we only had 1 small bag of chips which Hitch used 1/3 of the batter for. I added chopped cranberries and pecans to the other 2/3 for the cranberry-nut cookies we had at the Christmas Tour of Homes. Weren't they yummy?

Maybe if you're lucky, I'll have a spectacular Fail next week. For Christmas.

Friday Fail!

Crap.

I was really hoping I could let this little Friday routine die. But until I change my habits, it probably won't die of it's own accord.

As we were going through the week, I was thinking that there might not be anything to post about this week. Alas, no. And let me tell you---this is a failure in so many ways.

It was my busiest day this week, Wednesday. We had to go to the Farmer's Market to pick up our produce, eggs & milk. Then we went to Joann's to get some more yarn for the scarf, then to Costco to pick up the Christmas cards. All in the pouring, "driving" rain!

Then we came home to lunch and finish up important schoolwork in 1.5 hours, during which time I decided to slice the turnips to roast them before they went bad. Got them in the oven, but they weren't done in time so I turned off the oven before piano.

Forgetting that we were going straight to The School to pick up the big boys and we didn't return until 5. Did I mention the driving rain that was still coming down? Seriously, don't they know we're in an extreme drought and it never rains like this?

So I had 2 hours to straighten up and get some things done before Choir. Fortunately I had gotten dinner into the crockpot. The non-burning kind. The best decision I made all day.

I awoke at 5 a.m. realizing the turnips were still in the oven. Sigh. But since I knew they wouldn't kill me, I turned the oven back on to finish cooking them. I know some of you are shocked, but we're a hardy lot! Our foremothers wouldn't have wasted them!

Between the computer and a much-needed shower, somehow those suckers got over-cooked, and here they are:

Just between you and me, I think it was the computer addiction that led to the demise of the turnips. Just as it led to the demise of my beautiful, broccoli soup the day before. I know you''ll be sorry to hear I didn't take a picture, but I was just too ticked off!

I had only gotten onto the computer for the simple purpose of downloading the Christmas picture onto a disk to take to Costco when I discovered the secret place where Costco hides the order form for Christmas cards. I spent over an hour designing my card (which I ended up NOT loving, after all) while my soup boiled away and burned to a crispy mess on the bottom of my pot. Sigh. My sweet children just thought it needed to keep cooking.

I need to STOP the insanity. STOP multi-tasking. So, today, I'm not going to do anything EXCEPT feed my computer addiction. The rest of the household can wait.


You know I'm joking, right?

Coffee Fail

When I titled Tuesdays' post "Back to the Daily Grind" dh immediately thought it was a coffee reference. To be honest, so did I. I thought that post should be about coffee. But I decided it would be better to save for a Friday Fail.

Because it was a serious failure.

When we got back from the beach Sunday evening, the Master of the World went out for necessities, coffee being one of them. Typically frugal, he picked up the cheapest beans on sale.


A guy could seriously lose his title "Master of the World" for a mistake like this one!

I can't remember when I've had such bad coffee! No smooth, mellow, comforting warmth. There's warmth, but it burns my throat all the way down. It's rough and acidic. And it doesn't taste very good on the tongue, either.

I had to go out and buy some of this to mix with it and, hopefully, mellow the experience somewhat. It's much better. Not perfect, but better. Oh, and this one was on sale too, so we didn't just mix the cheap, bad coffee with expensive, good coffee. We mixed it with cheap, good coffee.



Buy good coffee, folks. It's worth it. One of our favorites is Starbuck's Caffe Verona when it's on sale at Target! Or a special trip to Trader Joe's for a really good deal on coffee beans! 'Cuz no one wants to greet the new day by burning away their esophagus.

Evil!

Do you see the evil spaghetti squash lurking in back of the beautiful, good fruit?

He's so evil that he couldn't wait for the microwave. While I was on the computer (remember the blogging addiction?) the other day, we heard a familiar **boom**. He had rolled off the counter for no good reason and fallen onto the floor where he cracked open!

But I had the last laugh. I dealt him several decisive blows with a butcher knife and put him in the microwave. No further explosions that day! muahahahaha!

So, today, HE is the failure.

Hat Fail

Okay, it's not really a hat. It's a giant, white chocolate Hershey's Kiss.

This is my first attempt at the Anna of Green Cables hat which I fell in love with. All you experienced knitters out there know that you're supposed to check your gauge before starting! I'm seriously too good for that. My gauge is always exactly what it's supposed to be.

I guess this time I didn't bother to use the correct yarn for the job. So, this lovely wool hat is kinda small.

Since it is wool, I think I'll just shrink it and find a baby or a doll who can use it.

So you don't think I'm a total FAILure, come back soon to see my successful Anna of Green Cables. In green, no less.

Friday Fail

No, you didn't click the wrong link. This is not www.failblog.org

This is A Shower of Roses where only good things happen. Right? Hmmm, not always.

After my little accident the other day, which I took a picture of, because I'm a blogging mom, TMax thought I should start a regular, weekly feature called

Friday Fail

Seriously?

Do I fail that often?

Now I know what he thinks of me.


Here it is. The moment you've all been waiting for. This week's fail:




My spaghetti squash exploded in the microwave and made a lovely, loud boom that the kids really enjoyed. It even made the microwave stop running.

But that's not nearly as good as the last exploding spaghetti squash of which I cannot locate a photo at the moment. That time, the microwave spat it out on the floor and slammed the door shut again! We went in the kitchen to check on the source of the disturbance and found the squash all over the floor and the microwave closed. Weird.

Even I will admit that was a pretty spectacular Fail.

There have been lots more spaghetti squash successes than failures. Honest.

Stay tuned. Let's see if I live up (down) to TMax's expectations!