Malawry

In both Frederick and Jefferson County classes, I have about 20% men/80% women. In Frederick it varies by class. Men seem much more likely to come with a spouse, while women usually come alone. I've only taught one man who came alone so far. Thanks, I did sleep fairly well last night. Who knows, though, there may be a nap in my future this afternoon!

This will be my last word on the whole Wal*Mart issue. Costco is a world apart from Wal*Mart in terms of how they treat their employees, and employee treatment is one of the top things that concern me when I decide where to spend my dollars. I am also very happy with their product line, their service and their low prices. But yes, Costco is a big box store--I am not opposed to every big box store out there, though I am more limited in my big-box shopping than most American consumers because I am very specific about where I spend my money. I may be only about 85 miles from Washington, but this is definitely the rural edge of suburbia, and there are not a lot of small retailers in my neck of the woods. My life would be simplified greatly by shopping at Wal*Mart, and my checkout slips would definitely reflect lower prices there as well. I drive 30 minutes to Martinsburg to visit K-mart rather than going to Wal*Mart 3 miles down the road. I am willing to go to great lengths to speak with my dollars, and I feel fortunate that I'm in an economic position that I can make that choice. Lots of other people are mostly stuck. I don't judge people for their choices, but I do hope that people who are in a position to do so make specific choices rather than sticking with what's convenient or cheap. I think making specific choices about food shopping, in particular, has a big impact on what foods are available in any given market. Ruth, it sounds like you are making choices about where you shop, and I'm all in favor of that!

Thanks for the tips! I have gone to Sysco's trade shows in Baltimore, but not to the MD Mid-atlantic Expo. I'll definitely look into it. I have also purchased a lot of equipment from Gilbert Restaurant Supply in Frederick.

Good morning, all. I did sleep reasonably well last night for once, aided by two kitty-cats curled up on and beside me. (Plus a warm spouse always helps too!) We are owned by three cats in this house, but their dietary habits are fairly uninteresting...they are limited to Iams and filtered water, and the occasional human-grade tuna from a can when we're fixing some for ourselves. Sometimes we like to say that we're having a child to even up the cat-human ratio--it is a dangerous thing when the feline lobby outnumbers the human lobby in any situation, makes it very hard for the humans to retain alpha position. Tonight's menu is much more simple than many of you were guessing. Chicken stock, tomato soup and a lemon tart. They are very into the desserts and specifically requested that I try to fit in a dessert for each class. I think stocks are essential as learning tools. I make my chicken stock like Fat Guy does, with a whole chicken plus some supplemental thighs (or backs or something, but Wal*Mart doesn't carry any interesting chicken parts...no feet either). Stock takes several hours, and my class is only 2 hours long. So I'm gonna make one batch of stock this afternoon and take it to class to strain and reduce it, and we'll start a fresh batch while I'm there so everybody can see what stock looks like in the early phases and practice their knife skills on the mirepoix. I like to include a recipe that uses the stock, and tomato soup (finished with heavy cream) is a quick, easy and popular stock-based dish. (Though I usually make my tomato soup with vegetarian stock at home.) The lemons, butter and egg are for that tart. I have flour and sugar and whatnot already on hand for adding to the mixtures. The strawberries will just be a garnish on the tart, along with a little whipped cream--I guess they threw a lot of you off! I would have liked to have covered a braised dish tonight as well, but there's only so much one can fit into 2 hours of classwork--it's really not a lot of time! We may hold back the chicken thighs, a little mirepoix and a can of tomatoes and try to do braised chicken thighs if it looks like we have time.

Jason, you got components of your guesses right. I'll come fess up in the morning. Right now, I am heading for bed.

No more guesses on what I'm teaching tomorrow night? I'm disappointed. Go back and look at my Wal*Mart shopping cart, it contains most of the ingredients I'll be working with tomorrow.

But there's built-in compensation! Unless you go round leaving hard evidence in foodblogs, your pregnancy brain-drain will *also* wipe all humiliating memories of pregnancy stupor from your post-pregnant memory! ← I guess it's too late, since I'm roped into staying here for a full week.

I just had a little chocolate experiment with the leftover dark chocolates and the leftover ganache from last night's class. I chopped all the dark chocolates except the Hershey's and the Baker's and melted them down together. I rolled the ganache into truffle centers and then coated them with melted chocolate and rolled them in powdered sugar or cocoa powder. (I didn't feel like bothering with tempering the dark chocolate, so this way I didn't have to worry about the finish.) Then I dipped some cheesecake bites in chocolate with plans to freeze them--the result of that experiment was not so pretty because the cheesecake was crumbly and very hard to coat well. But it's just for family snacking, so it's not that important to me how it looks. Photos of dinner and tonight's chocolate projects to follow tomorrow.

Man, what a great dinner. We just had some dry-rubbed ribs that I started mid-afternoon, and some hand-cut coleslaw alongside. For some strange reason, I am craving a Coca-Cola, but if I was going to indulge in one I certainly wouldn't do so at 7:30pm. (Not with my sleep issues!) Photos to come tomorrow, most likely. I meant to get a bunch of stuff done in the kitchen this afternoon, but it didn't happen. Sometimes I feel lethargic and unmotivated. It was a beautiful day outside for once...weird to have temps in the 50s (F) when there's snow on the ground! I spent an hour this afternoon wrestling with my car...I drive a 2005 Honda Element (the one that looks like a Soviet milk truck) and had yanked out the back seats months ago to make more room for schlepping catering supplies around. Well, my husband is taking the Element to Charleston, WV for a conference next week because he's carting some students along with him, so I figured I'd better get the seats back into the car. It took me over an hour, including a long phone call to the dealer, to figure out how to make it work, but I did get it done (and each of those seats weighs about 35 pounds--not light for a pregnant lady). Now my car appears to have a much smaller capacity, and it's gonna be weird to drive it tomorrow with backseats behind me, but the seats are probably there to stay now that Colin is on the way. I am hoping one of the gifts from this weekend's baby shower will be one of the 2 car seats we registered for, in which case I'll probably go ahead and get it installed at a fire department to be sure it's in there right. I don't know what I'll do for future catering gigs...I can pull out one seat rather than both back seats if needed, so I may try to make that work. Usually we have to do some engineering to make everything fit for a catering job to begin with, though! I don't even want to think about it right now. I sold my old car, a 5-door VW Golf hatchback, to buy the Element late last summer. The Golf held an awful lot of stuff for such a little car, but it can't compare to the Element's haul capacity. How much stuff I can haul has a huge impact on what kind of job I can take. I didn't realize this until after I did my first big job (a 75-guest wedding), but even if I get to the point where I have enough catering business to start acquiring my own tableware for rent, there's no way I can haul tableware AND all the food, beverages and assorted equipment I already have to take on a job. If I lined up a really big wedding, I'd have to build in the cost of renting a trailer or even a truck to my estimates. In some ways I'm learning as I go along with the catering thing--I've not had a major or even a minor mishap at a job yet, but catering is a huge organizational and logistical puzzle more than it's a cooking challenge for somebody with my skill set. Fortunately, I enjoy tackling those types of problems. Double-fortunately, I don't have any gigs lined up right now, because I find my brain has a hard time wrapping around such problems at this point in my pregnancy. Speaking of pregnancy brain issues...I have to tell you the Story of the Corned Beef. My mom has this terrific recipe for a sweet-sour corned beef. A few weeks ago, I picked up a raw corned beef from Costco to cook for our dinner. The package said the meat weighed 2.8lbs. Mom's recipe said to simmer the meat with some aromatics for 40min/lb. I could NOT figure out how long to simmer the meat for the longest time! I was resisting writing it down because I normally convert recipes and do time calculations in my head as second nature--I don't even have to think about it before proceeding, I just...do it. (I don't especially enjoy math, but I'm very good at simple arithmetic and normally just do it all in my head.) Finally I figured out that I needed to simmer the meat for about 112 minutes. Then I went to program the timer on my range and realized I couldn't figure out how to program 112 minutes...if you put in "112" that reads as 1 hour, 12 minutes. Finally I figured it all out and got everything going, but that was a humiliating experience for me overall. It really is true, your brain just goes on vacation when you're pregnant. At least mine has.

I am stopping work almost an entire month before my due date, and plan to spend much of that month preparing food for the freezer...braises, soups, chili, whatever freezes well. (My husband asked me what exactly I'd be doing all that month, and I tried to say "eating bonbons and watching soap operas," but he knew I was lying because we don't have cable and there is no local TV service unless you subscribe. Well, maybe I'll eat bonbons...and comb consignment shops for baby schwag that we're not gifted with, and buy nursing bras, and set up baby furniture, and pace holes in the floor, and...) I WISH local Costcos carried Churros! Though if they DID carry them, I'd start whining that there was no hot chocolate to go with them. I'm never satisfied.

As Alison Bechdel wrote, the hallways smell of tempera paint and fear. When you guess on Thursday's class, remember that it's part of my 6-class "basics of cooking" series, not one of the one-off single-subject classes I teach on Tuesdays in Frederick. The contents of my shopping cart at Wal*Mart constitute most of what I need for tomorrow night.

Go to this page and click on "Big Box Mart" for a short movie that sums up my problems with Wal*Mart. Wal*Mart is America's largest retailer and a major cultural force to contend with. I'd go into more detail, but it's hard to do so without getting super-politicised and inappropriate on a food discussion website. Many Wal*Marts are the only store in their area where you can buy basics. And many Wal*Marts, including the one in Charles Town, WV where I shopped today, are "SuperCenters" that include most of the things you'd expect from a supermarket along with the sporting goods, toys, hardware, housewares, electronics and zillion other things they carry.

I remember attending a game at Wrigley a year and a half ago. We ate lunch at one of the greasy bars near the stadium, where I had really good wings (wings are usually pretty reliable in these places, in my experience). Anyway, your treatment of the Hebrew National hot dog sounds very Chicagoan to me...tomatoes and pepperoncini are not ever available as dog toppings here on the East Coast. I grew up on HN dogs and have been a lifelong devotee of their product. I'll eat other Kosher dogs, like Sinai 48, but not with the same enthusiasm. (I don't eat non-Kosher hot dogs at all. I remember once, as a kid, my swim team had a hot dog dinner at the end of the season. My parents suggested we'd go in time for the sundaes for dessert, but I wanted a HOT DOG for dinner and said I wanted to go early enough to get one. They conceded but warned me I probably wouldn't like the pup. I didn't listen. I still remember how gross those ordinary Oscar Mayer type dogs tasted to me...I took one bite and decided to fill up on baked beans and potato chips instead. Urgh. I have not consumed a non-Kosher hot dog since, and the aroma of a non-Kosher hot dog is quite unappetizing to me.)

So that brings me to this morning. When I woke up early, I made my husband's lunch, as I described earlier. Here's a photo of what he took: Salad, cheddar cheese and chicken with marsala sauce. I eventually went back to bed for 2 hours, then I got up for the day, showered, and booked it to Jefferson County's Board of Education office building where my boss for the JC Adult Education program has her office. She has an account set up with a nearby store with its own card so I can purchase groceries for my classes there without paying, but since other people use the card too I have to pick it up, go shopping, and then return the card immediately. Beth, my boss with JC, usually leaves the office after noon since she's working on a degree from Shepherd U (where my husband teaches), and she often has to go out to schools to set things up for other instructors. So I picked up the card from her, ribbed her about the big Valentine's Day floral/balloon arrangement on her desk, and went shopping for tomorrow's class. I hate to tell you this. I really do. But the Jefferson County Schools house account is at... Around my household, we call this place Mall*Wart, and we refuse to give them a dime of our business. I was dismayed to discover that this is where I'd have to do my shopping for my JC classes, and I even had to undergo a little intervention with my husband on the subject that went something like this: Spouse: You have to buy your groceries WHERE? Me: Well, at least I don't have to pay for them out of pocket and wait to be reimbursed. Spouse: (pause) Well, just don't slip up and buy anything for US while you're there. I try to regard my forays into the Wal*Mart Food Center as anthropological expeditions, which makes the shopping trip more fun. I have to admit the prices are VERY low, but at what cost? I haven't really explored the store beyond the Food Center and don't really intend to do so. It always amazes me how big these places are. I mean, look at this! The produce is better in terms of selection and quality than I expected before my first Wal*Mart visit. They even have "Wal*Mart TV" playing at the checkouts to entertain you while you wait in line. There's a million self-checkout lines, but I have to wait for a checker in order to use the purchase order and shopping card the school system gives me. My weekly budget for my JC classes is $50, which is not exactly ample, but I manage to make it work most of the time...and if I go over a little one week it's okay because I go under some weeks as well. Here's what I bought: Carrots, celery, onions, parsley, whole chickens, chicken thighs, lemons, strawberries, heavy whipping cream, butter, eggs, canned tomatoes. I didn't buy some of the things I'll need because I've bought them in previous weeks and still have plenty on hand--things like salt and flour. Any guesses as to what's on the menu at my JC class tomorrow night? After I paid, I returned the card to Beth and came home. I guess now would be a good time to actually finish unpacking from last night's class and start working on tonight's dinner.

So once my students arrived and assembled their chocolate samplers, I did my usual introduction song-and-dance, including handing out my handouts and my business cards. I always write my recipes out for people but encourage them to add their own notes (my savory recipes do not usually include measurements to encourage them to learn to trust their instincts and to make their own notes, and my pastry recipes all use a scale instead of cup measurements to encourage people to get a scale and get used to using it. One student who was with me for my French bistro cooking class a few weeks ago told me she bought a scale because of my class and she's been using it, too! ) My classes have been mostly demonstration in format. I think it's better as a student to see lots of different things than to actually make only one or two things while other people make everything else. I do attempt to get students involved, using them as volunteers to handle jobs and encouraging them to try things like layering filo dough or stirring up a ganache at different points in the class. Still, it can be a little stiff with me talking and them listening at the beginning of the class, so I have started relying on my old culinary school war stories as a way to loosen things up. If you've read my culinary school diary, you may remember highlights like my cutting myself on a mandoline, Chef Peter calling my duxelles "dog food," and our Thai Chef Somchet who had a hard time pronouncing the English hard "c"--it came out as an "x," making "Triple Sec" into "Triple Sex." Once people start laughing, especially if they're laughing and eating at the same time, they tend to get into things and they start asking good questions and interacting with each other well. That's always my goal. So I lectured on chocolate for a while, talking about what types there are, how they differ, what kinds are good for cooking with or for eating or for both. I demonstrated how to chop chocolate and then how to melt it when melting the chocolate for the brownies, so they saw a bain-marie and they saw me use the scale to weigh the stuff. The brownies went into the oven around 7:45, and then I guided them through the chocolate tastings. Some of the chocolates were surprisingly disgusting. The Villars 73% dark was a standout...it tasted chalky and gritty and very dirty. There's an idyllic image of a cow in a field before the Swiss Alps on the box, which I studied and joked, "Yes, I think there's dirt in that image..." That was a shocker because the Villars milk chocolate is actually pretty good--a little too sweet, but very silky and smooth. The Hershey's milk and special dark fared better than expected, but not well--they were considered merely "good" by most tasters. The Chocovic single-origin chocolates varied quite a lot...the Forastero bean was not very popular, but everybody loved the one made from Criollo beans (I think that was the Venezuelan bar). As I told Jason earlier, the ultradarks were not that popular with most people, but one lady was very enthusiastic about them--especially the 85% Valrhona. (Even the one who was most vocal about disliking the ultradarks conceded that they might be nice as a contrasting garnish to a very light, sweet dessert like a white chocolate mousse.) Everybody was really loosened up by this point, and the rest of the class moved quickly. We made a batch of ganache and I had everybody try their hands at rolling truffle centers with some hardened ganache I'd made on Monday. We poured some ganache on the brownies and ate the brownies. And then we cleaned up. I think people were pretty happy with the class overall; I certainly had a good time! I dropped off my paperwork at the FCC campus after I wrapped things up, and was home by 10pm--the earliest I've gotten home yet (all my classes end at 9pm, and I live 30 minutes away).

So the classroom where I teach for FCC is not on the FCC campus. FCC's professional culinary program is fairly new...I think it's about 2-3 years old...and they don't have their own kitchens set up yet. Instead, the professional classes are taught at a career and vocational center run by the public school system that happens to be right on the main FCC campus. That space is used by the school system on weekdays and by the professional program on weeknights. I teach in there when I teach children's classes on Saturday morning. It's a great space, but you don't get to see it because I'm not teaching there this week. There happens to be a public middle school across the street from the FCC campus, and that is where I teach FCC classes on Tuesday nights. It's a fairly standard middle school, which appears to have been built out in the late 1970s. I teach in a middle school Family and Consumer Sciences classroom. Here's what it looks like: This is the demo station at the front of the classroom, where I set up and do most of my teaching. You can't see it, but there is a mirror suspended over the station so everybody can see what I'm doing. I usually put all ingredients on the round table you see to the left, and pull the cart of equipment to the right so I can get to everything quickly. This is what I see when I stand at the demo station. I have students sit at those little round tables. The left side of the room is lined with kitchenettes where I can have people work if desired (there are 4 kitchenettes in addition to the demo kitchen). It's not a bad setup, especially if you like burnt orange. So when I arrived, I unpacked my car, and then I went to the closet with the locked filing cabinet where FCC's supplies are stored. I meant to get a pic of the closet but I was involved mentally in what I was doing and forgot to take my camera in there. It has almost everything a person could need to use for teaching a class--a scale, half-sheets, foils and wraps and gloves, pots and pans, tons of utensils, 2 professional Kitchen-Aid mixers, measuring cups, about 8 paring knives and 2 chef's knives, cutting boards, etc etc. I've added some staples like flour and EVOO to the closet. There are also disposable tableware items, a couple big Cambros, half-pans (steamtable type half-hotel-pans), and other things in there. There's even cleaning supplies in a bucket, ready to use. The cart lives in that closet and it's easy to load up whatever I need and push it to and from the classroom. The only big thing it's missing is a Cuisinart or similar food processor--I've brought mine from home a couple times already and I know I'll be needing it again in the future. I keep forgetting to ask Chef Lang about acquiring one for me. I loaded up the cart, pushed it into the classroom, unloaded some of the equipment off the cart and onto the counters, and then I started setting up my chocolate samples. I began by chopping the Hershey's and Baker's chocolates I'd bought at Weis, and then I put everything into bowls, labeled them with index-card numbers I'd made the previous night, and wrote out a cheat sheet of which chocolate was which. Getting all that set up took longer than I'd anticipated. I put some paper plates on the table and had people assemble their own samples as they arrived. Most folks numbered their plates so they could tell which chocolate went with which number. There were 22 samples altogether! I had grouped them by type: whites, milks, 60s-family dark, 70s-family dark, and the two ultradarks. By the time I was done setting up the chocolate samples, I had very little time left for MEP. I Criscoed, parchmented and re-Criscoed a half-sheet pan for baking brownies with, and I cracked the eggs for the brownies into a mixer bowl. And then it was time to get started, because all my students had arrived!

OK, so more detail on last night. After I signed off, I drove to Frederick and ran a few errands. This included the aforementioned Costco hot-dog dinner trip; I picked up some shaving cream for my husband while there and noted that about 65% of the shoppers were buying flowers for Valentine's Day. One guy in line ribbed me about the shaving cream and I ribbed him back, saying they'd last my husband longer than the roses he was buying would last his wife. When we got married, we agreed to no longer observe Valentine's Day, but to observe our anniversary instead, and we're both perfectly happy with that decision. That's why I was willing to teach a class on Valentine's Day instead of spending it home or out at a restaurant with my sweetie. (I think of V-day as an amateur night anyway, from a restaurant standpoint. Anybody else who has worked in a fine dining restaurant kitchen on that holiday knows exactly what I mean...) After I snarfed my dog, my husband called and I realized I'd forgotten my painstaking shopping list, course objective and class outline. Once again, all the blood has moved from my brain to my uterus, and I am forgetting things that ordinarily are second nature. Sigh. So I asked if I could call him back when I got to Weis and have him read me all that info so I could scribble some notes, and he said sure. Wotta guy. After I got to the store and called him, I went in to do the rest of my shopping for last night's class. Weis looks like a dump from the outside, but it's actually a decent supermarket in many regards. I've been happy with most of the produce and meat I've purchased from them since I started teaching. The chocolate selection in the baking aisle is fairly paltry, as you can see. What is with the proliferation of flavored chips these days? I remember when you could get Nestle semi-sweet and store brand chocolate chips and that was it. Now they have peanut butter-chocolate chips, caramel chocolate-chips, etc etc. Anyway, as you can see, they carry Baker's line, some Ghirardelli and of course Nestle and Hershey's. There was a product I hadn't seen before there too: Baker's chocolate shavings in a can, below the Diamond nuts on the left. Wotta ripoff. Though I'd rather eat those than the Nestle "pre-melted" chocolate...what the HELL is in that crap? The "eating chocolate" over near the other candy at Weis is not much to speak of from a selection standpoint, either. They carry all the Hershey's of course, and there are a few Perugina and Guylian bars and bonbons along the top but they don't carry just plain chocolate--only filled or shaped chocolate bars and pieces. I couldn't believe how cheap Hershey's big bars are...like $1.29! No wonder people think they're good...if they like quantity and low prices, anyway. I was gonna shoot my shopping cart, but a. you got my grocery list yesterday and b. there was no line when I checked out, so I just loaded my stuff on the conveyor belt and paid with the house account for FCC. I love shopping on somebody else's dime! After that, it was on to the school where I teach...

I bet Dean and DeLuca and Balducci's have your number, Hanqie Panquie. Also call the TPSS Co-op and ask if they carry what you're looking for, if you're willing to brave MoCo. The Takoma Park location has a much larger selection of dry goods, so check there first.

Hey, whaddaya know? Too bad you moved away, we could have compared notes. I actually considered hitting up places like the Carriage Inn to see of they wanted a breakfast chef. Then I realized that mornings SUCK for this pregnant lady and changed my mind. The Carriage Inn looks really nice from the road. I live in the unincorporated part of Harpers Ferry, not too far from Halltown off 230, so parts of Charles Town are actually closer to me than downtown HF.

I have no catering gigs lined up right now, period. I haven't really been working to get them because they take so much out of me physically and I'm starting to wind down pre-baby. I do have a friend who has talked to me about doing some stuff for her daughter's baptism, but it's scheduled for April 15 so I told her I could only do something like pastry and cakes that can be frozen...nothing a-la-minute, no service staff, nothing else. She's thinking about it. I will be looking for catering gigs starting in late July/early August, when I plan to return to work on a part-time basis. I'm really only part-time right now as it is, but both FCC and Jefferson County are after me to do much more teaching starting next fall. (Actually, both wanted me this spring/summer, but I had to say no!) Catering and private classes are far more lucrative than the FCC and Jefferson County gigs, though they both require a lot more legwork on my part. I did cater a few parties and run a private class last month.

I'm back to life now, after a 2-hour nap, and ready to rejoin the world. A good thing, because I need to make it to the Jefferson County Schools administrative offices, to a store, and back to the offices by noon. I'm taking off and will snap some photos along the way.

Funny how all the parents of kids named Colin are coming out of the woodwork to support our name choice. We'd picked out our girl name first: Caileen Ruth. So when we couldn't come up with a boy name, we went with the male version of Caileen. "Elijah" because I wanted a very Jewish-sounding name somewhere in there to reflect our Jewish family (Jones is not a very Jewish last name after all), and because we both like Elijah--it's a powerful and mystical name. The prophet Elijah is supposed to be present at all kinds of important events in a person's life, including the bris (ritual circumcision). As for eggs--we are sick and tired of them, alas. I had a major surplus of eggage recently and did a bunch of baking to get them moved into the freezer. I figure between all the people who will be visiting when the baby is born and the bris ceremony, there will be plenty of opportunities to eat cakeys this spring. (Hopefully, it won't all happen during Passover!) I do make chicken and turkey salads every now and then, but I don't usually put eggs in them. I always put them in my tuna salad, but even though I CRAVE tuna I don't let myself have it more than once a month 'cause I'm concerned about mercury. I can occasionally hard-boil some eggs and toss them on salads or make a little egg salad, but we both tire of that quickly.

I just made a lunch for my spouse: a salad and some chicken breasts with some kind of marsala sauce I found in the fridge, along with a chunk of cheddar cheese that he can either eat as a snack or as part of his mid-day meal. I pack lunches for him daily, plus I either pack or bring him dinner Monday nights when he has an evening rehearsal. (Plus of course I feed him when he's home, too!) I have a hard time being creative, especially since I usually only want to make something quick for him and he's doing the low-carb thing. I try to keep easy things that he likes such as lunch meats, assorted sausages and cheeses on hand for him...he'll heat those or throw some chicken wings in the oven if I'm teaching or otherwise unable to feed him. I was planning to give him the last of the meatballs I made on Monday morning for lunch, but he ate them for both breakfast and dinner yesterday so there aren't any left. He always eats a salad and some cheese for part of his lunches. If I get really stuck for time and energy he ends up with a big chef salad topped with whatever's around. I'm gonna try to go back to sleep now. Wish me luck, I have to get up and moving for the day by 10am. Sigh.

I wonder if we are by chance related? ← Her first name is Rhonda. She resides in Frederick, MD. You tell me.

So, I'm awake after only about 5 hours of sleep, and feeling somewhat bleary as a result. I may try to go back to bed in a little while. I find I have no trouble falling asleep, but when I wake up to use the bathroom (which I always do at least once each night) I frequently have difficulty falling back asleep. I've started giving myself a time limit of 1 hour...if I am still awake an hour later, I get up and do something productive for a while, and then when I feel really sleepy I go back to bed. I was feeling peckish, so I ate a small ganache-topped brownie from last night's class when I got up. I also popped some chicken breasts into a bowl of water to defrost for my husband's lunch--I normally would have made his lunch for today before I left for my class yesterday, but due to the blood moving from my brain to my uterus I forgot. I'm going to either turn them into chicken parm or just saute them and add them to a big salad along with some bacon, cheese and other low-carb friends for his lunch. He's awake too now, so I can cook without waking him but, but his presence means I can't download last night's photos until later today. I have a somewhat busy day ahead today, but you'll have to wait and watch it unfold as it happens.