hat day, mother sauces, stock and chocolates

Oooh boy, these late night classes are late. I just got home and it is a quarter to midnight. Yikes! But I do love learning. Today we learned about the school’s competition team, which meets Saturday morning. I would love to join, but right now I feel so tired it’s hard to imagine trying to fit that in. I guess we’ll just have to see.

It feels like forever ago, but this morning I took the girls to the library for story time. The theme was “hats,” and at the end the librarians brought out a ton of hats for the kids to wear. They set up a little footstool next to a cardboard Woody so the kids could all have their pictures taken with Woody. Here are the girls:

library hat library mary libraryAfterward, I let the girls play in one of the little play caves. There were a ton of kids there, and Mary really wanted to climb a popular set of stairs. She stood there staring longingly at them for a while until Lydia cleared a path for her. My shy little Lydia came over and in a loud, confident voice said to the kids, “Get out of the way! Get out of the way! Come on, Mary. Good job, Mary!!” She led Mary up and down the stairs, and the other children kindly cleared out of the way.

Then we came home and ate, read, and played. Mary took a short nap, and I didn’t want to believe her nap was over when she started crying, so I took her into bed with me. It worked, and she slept ten more minutes. I’ll take it. Plus, I got to cuddle my baby, so it was really a win-win.

My favorite quote from class today was, “Nutmeg is the thug of the spice world.” (We were making the mother sauces, and this was in reference to our treatment of the bechamel.) I actually didn’t practice any of the mother sauces because I ended up doing the class’s stock, and that took almost the whole time. Between the twenty chicken carcasses and attempting to deglaze giant sheet pans (while the fumes from the alcohol burst into flames all around the pans), I was a little busy. I am a wimp about fire, and I learned that I will have to get over that. The worst part was when a giant pan got stuck in one of the ovens; to get it out, you have to pull with ALL of your strength while your hands are in the hot oven. It feels…dangerous.

So anyway, I’ll see about Saturday. The team meets from 8am to noon, and that’s right when I try to make it to yoga. So either I could wake up earlier and go to the 6am yoga before the team meets, or I could just try running before hand and do yoga on a weeknight. Right now I just know I need to do something, because my class meets at the same time as the chocolates class, and they send plates upon plates of chocolates over to our kitchen. It’s alarming and delicious, all at the same time.