Cranky McCranker

I think I fell out of the wrong side of bed this morning.

I woke up early with a sinus headache.  On the Happy Scale, this is somewhere below sorting socks and slightly above cleaning up warm cat vomit.   I can take some OTC medicine to kick those kinds of headaches,  but the medicine leaves me with brain fog and tiredness that usually lasts most of the day.  This falls only slightly higher on the Happy Scale as the original headache.  But my head really hurt, so I took the OTC meds.

The plan for today was to cook.  REALLY cook.  When I started working outside the home, my time and energy for cooking pretty much flew out the door and the meals I prepared began to resemble my Fairy Godmother:  cheap and easy.  You can bet SHE never bothered to show her lazy butt and pick up any of the slack, that’s for sure.  But today I had the day off and a 7lb Boston Butt pork roast that needed to be cooked.  My family was going to get a good meal for dinner, dagnabit.  And eventually, they did.

But first there was the baking of a cake.  Not just any cake, either.  It was the cake on the cover of last month’s Southern Living magazine, an Apple Cream Cheese Bundt cake.  Apple cake with a cream cheese swirl and brown sugar icing and toasted pecans.  I’ve been waiting a good month for time to bake this cake, gradually picking up supplies for it.  So the last thing I counted on this morning was TWO– count ’em, TWO– interrupting trips to the store to pick up items we normally have in the house but were not around when I went searching for them.

Someone was getting cranky.  And by someone, I mean me.

I finally got the cake put together and in the oven.  I was now running way behind in timing, and that big ole butt needed a lot of time in the oven for roasting, because that cut of meat needs a low temp and a long time.  But I popped it in once the cake was out and prayed it would be done in time for a 6pm dinner, knowing that the youngest Sparkette had a soccer game at 7:45pm.

I made garlic mashed potatoes and broccoli in between texts from the 14 year old who felt I should drop what I was doing and drive to the library to pick up HER AND HER BIKE.  Yeah…go figure.  The roast, which actually cooked perfectly in the amount of time I had, left plenty of good juices for a really nice gravy.  It was a nice meat-and-potatoes dinner, and there are lots of leftovers for sandwiches and pork tacos.  There’s even a pound in the freezer for use at a later date.

But dang it…I forgot the baking soda in the cake.  It tasted great but was dense, more like a steamed pudding than a cake.  I will need a do-over, preferably on a day my head isn’t fogged out from meds that haven’t really gotten rid of the headache they were intended to kill.

Or maybe my Fairy Godmother will actually show up and DO something.

Yeah, right.