Weekend Update

Recipes made this weekend:

-  My Dad’s Spaghetti Sauce (I’m sure every Italian cooks thinks their sauce is the best,  but bias aside, this is the best sauce I’ve ever eaten. Hands down. Takes ample time to prepare, and cooks on the stovetop for 3 hours. Enough said)

-  My stepmom Pat’s Chicken Pasta salad (Simple as all get-out. White meat chicken, bow tie pasta, black olives, onions, celery, mixed with a mayo/sour cream/vinegar dressing. With a douse of salt and pepper. I make a huge batch and eat it every day for lunch for a week. I never tire of it.)

-  Nana’s Waldorf Salad (Apples, walnuts, and celery mixed with a mayo/sugar dressing, and wonderful memories of my Nana.)

-  Cheese-stuffed jumbo pasta-shells (A recipe I got from a dinner party when we lived in California  — ages ago — and I’m just now making it. Now I remember why I asked for the recipe.)

Kasey, Harleigh’s boyfriend, came into town Friday evening for a counselor job interview at Camp All-American where Harleigh will be a core-leader this year. He stayed with me that evening as the interview was early on Saturday morning and his family is a good 1 ½ hours away. We went out to dinner, and I told Harleigh that I now fully see why she’s crazy about him.  What a kind, funny and interesting person. On Saturday morning I baked some Whole Foods Black Forest bacon. OH-MY-GOSH is this stuff amazing. Baked on a cookie sheet @ 375 degrees, 10 minutes on each side. At $7.99 a pound, it was worth the price. So worth the price.  (The pieces we didn’t eat, I finely chopped and added to My Dad’s Spaghetti Sauce.)

Weekend project completed: recovering chair seats. I had taken the cushions off of these chair seats so that I could use some anthropologie chair pads I'd recently gotten as a gift. The raw wood was splintery and so I covered the seats in two pretty fabrics that complement the fabrics of the new cushions.

My clematis is going cu-razy climbing up the rainspout!

I went into Goodwill on Saturday. There you go, I came clean. I enjoyed looking at things that I knew, had I not been on hiatus from thrift buying, would have made it home with me. I came dangerously close to buying a wooden child’s refrigerator, sink and hutch. All three pieces for $14. I would have refinished them. The hutch would have made an adorable side table.  The bottom line — I need a child’s play kitchen like I need a hole in the head. Lesson learned: stay away from thrift stores until your sabbatical; the thrift-store-regret is enough to kill ya.