Saturday’s Cooking Extravaganza

For the past few years on Father’s Day, I cook a big Father’s Day feat for the family. The meal always consists of meatloaf, and the side items vary from year-to-year. This year’s meal was planned to have the side items of coleslaw, deviled eggs, mashed potatoes, green beans, and fried okra, and dessert was to be strawberry cake. As I do every Friday, I went to the grocery store and I got all the items I needed to cook this year’s meal.

On Saturday morning, I went to the gym, ran a couple of errands and then planned to start cooking. I ran into a small obstacle in that while I was out running those errands, I started feeling bad. I was either hungry or it was the beginnings of a migraine or both because my vision became spotty. So, I cut the errands short, grabbed a bite to eat and headed home. Once home, I gobbled up that food, took some medicine for the oncoming headache, took a bath, and took a nap. Needless to say, at this point, I was already behind schedule as far as the cooking was concerned.

After napping for about an hour, I got up and grabbed the bag of potatoes from my pantry to start peeling them. However, after pulling out three potatoes, I realized that the whole bag was bad… and I only bought the bag a couple of weeks ago. So, I put on some shoes and went down to Star Market to get a five pound bag of Yukon Gold – my favorite. When I got home, I peeled and cut up the whole five pounds of potatoes and put them on the stove to cook. At the same time, I was cooking the green beans which I had broken up earlier that morning.

While the potatoes and beans were cooking, I made the deviled eggs from the eggs I had boiled that morning, and after that was done, I took a quick break and sat down on the couch to enjoy a couple of deviled eggs (I made some extra) a cold Diet Sunkist. You thought I was going to say Diet Coke didn’t you?

Just as I was enjoying my snack, I noticed it was getting awfully dark outside and the wind was picking up. I got up and went out the back door to get a blanket off the fence line that was hanging out to dry. I brought it in and put it in the dryer and turned on the TV to see what was going on with the weather. Just as I turned the channel to 48, the power went out. This was the first time since the big storms that my power has gone out. A lot of other people in the city have lost power at various times because the system is still fragile, but I have been lucky so far, until Saturday that is. I also want to take this moment to say how awful the “weather people” have been at predicting the weather this past week. It rained when they said it wouldn’t and all day when they said a few hours and there was no indication of rain for Saturday on their pretty maps and radars. Moving on…

Since the power was out and I couldn’t do any cooking, I went ahead and did what I could around the house. Saturday is my house cleaning day anyway and since I was already behind schedule I used the power outage time to do the dusting and cleaned up the kitchen and other things like that. I also turned the eyes of the stove off as soon as the power went out. One of the things I remember most from the out power outage in April was the constant warning of “check your stove and make sure it’s off” since the power went off right during dinner time. I work with a girl who apparently didn’t hear or heed that warning because when her power came back on, so did her stove top.

Finally, after about three and a half hours without power, I couldn’t take the sitting around any longer. So, I packed up all the groceries, some pots and pans and utensils, along with the green beans and potatoes from the stovetop as well as The Tide, and went to my parents’ house to continue the cooking there. At this point it was about 6:00 p.m. I got to their house and got everything unloaded and was back to work cooking a little after 6:30 p.m. and I proceeded to cook for the next two and half hours. I mixed the meatloaf. I finished cooking and creamed the potatoes. I finished cooking the green beans. I made the coleslaw. I cut up and breaded the okra.

I had forgotten to bring my vegetable oil and my parents’ were out. So, my dad made a run to the store and also stopped by Sonic for him a banana split and me a strawberry milkshake. Once he was back, I mixed up the cake and put it in the bake. I planned to mix up the icing while it was baking, but realized I had left the powdered sugar at home. So, I decided to mix it up when I got home and bring it back on Sunday to ice the cake. The cake would have to cool anyway so it wasn’t that big of a deal.

About 9:00, I had cleaned up the kitchen, stored everything away and given my dad instructions on putting the meatloaf in the oven the next day. We loaded up the car with the leftover supplies and The Tide and we headed back home. Thankfully the power was back on (it had come on around 7:30p.m.) and I was able to mix up the icing before watching a little TV and then going to bed. Needless to say, it was the most adventurous day I’ve ever had in regards to cooking.