Cook, clean, cook, clean, cook, clean, BREAK!

Every time I do this, I get to about this point and say, “That’s it, I quit and I’m never doing this again, EVER.”

So far, I’ve got:

For dinners:
3 pork chop meals with Marinade #1
3 pork chop meals with Marinade #2
3 pork pie meals
3 meatloaves (which will each also make one or two lunches)
6 taco casseroles (a layer of taco meat covered with a layer of kidney beans topped with cornmeal and baked)
4 chicken pot pies
6 quarts of spaghetti sauce (meat this time…usually I do “just” tomato sauce but the Denizens and their father did this big campaign for meat sauce so I did meat sauce…tune in next week to hear all the kids say, “Actually, I don’t think I like meat sauce.”
1 4# sauerbrauten “in progress”, which will be two dinners and then make a lot of lunches

For sides:
8 servings mashed potatoes
8 servings maple baked beans
8 servings black beans and rice
4 servings “smoked” beans (which is just beans baked with some BBQ sauce in the mix)
Lots of pre-existing bags of carrots, peas, zucchini and beets
48 warm-n-serve crescent rolls

For lunches:
8 pork with rice
8 beef with rice
8 Cornish pasties
8 curry chicken turnovers
8 Sloppy Joe turnovers
8 sesame chicken turnovers (with sesame seed oil instead of actual sesame seeds, in deference to the husband’s diverticulitis) (which bums me out but oh well, it is what it is)

For breakfasts:
Unbelievably, I’ve got nothing. I had (get this) 24 smallish turnovers stuffed with things like cinnamon-laced applesauce, homemade strawberry and blueberry jam, and a simple chocolate sauce…but then this swarm of children came through the house and I turned around and there were only three still on the counter. THREE. And by the next morning? There were none.

Truly. Astounding. It took less than ten minutes for almost two hours of work to just :poof!:, disappear.

Of course, when you have ten kids (my own four pus six neighborhood kids) passing through your kitchen, well, anything that isn’t nailed down or a vegetable is subject to vanishing. And they were all hungry, and they had all just been told, “NO!!!” by their Evil Overlord Parents when the ice cream truck came through, and these little turnovers taste an awful lot like Pop Tarts only they were fresh and hot and either crunchy with a cinnamon-sugar-water glaze or drizzled with confectioner’s sugar icing soooooooooooo…can’t blame them for each grabbing a couple and making a run for it.

I still have a few things to go (where “a few” equals “almost half”) (…sob…). Fortunately, most of it is a simple “layer and freeze” assembly rather than actual cooking at this point; unfortunately, there’s still a couple things that do require actual cooking and all of them are going to end up meaning more cleanup on aisle Whole Kitchen. Feh.

I kept hoping the kitchen fairies would, you know, zip in while I was using the bathroom and clean things up for me this weekend. But no. They were probably on furlough this weekend or something.

Budget cuts, I hates them…

Fortunately Tragically, I have to stop for a while now because I have a not-appointment with my hairdresser and eyebrow specialist over at Supercuts. It may be a sad commentary on my life in general, but it counts as a real treat when I get to go to Supercuts without any of the Denizens in tow…and today, I have a free hair wash and a free eyebrow wax. (Um…goody?) (You know what would be awesome? If I could either not care that I have a unibrow, or, if I would actually keep up the beautiful pair of arches she gives me…I always mean to and I usually do for a couple weeks but then I get lazy and I forget and I don’t do it and then the wooly caterpillar starts crawling across my forehead again and then I get all nervous because This One Time I overdid it on the self-plucking thing and ended up with these Mutant Alien Fuzzy Caterpillars of Lopsidedness of the Gods +10 perched awkwardly over my eyes and it took, like, years for them to grow out again [which is a great irony, isn’t it? It takes mere weeks for them to return to unibrow status, but overpluck and you’re looking at a fifteen year sentence of Mutant Alien Fuzzy Caterpillars of Lopsidedness of the Gods +10])

And then I have some free goodies from Victoria’s Secret to pick up, and some free goodies to get at JcPenny, and some rather impressive coupons to use at Target, plus Kohl’s has some nice things for me and I’ve got about $40 in Kohl’s cards to get them with, and guess what else?

My $25 Starbucks card arrived from MyPoints (wait…maybe it was SurveySpot…I can’t remember…I also don’t remember redeeming them, so it was probably over two months ago when I did so but who cares? I GOT A STARBUCK CARD IN THE MAIL!!!) over the weekend. Well, in either case: Woot.

…and I’ll try not to think about all the work I still have to get done tonight while I’m out and about…or that I have to go back to work tomorrow, whether my feet and back feel ready to do so or not…