My Day Off

I am at the end of my day off. Hmmm. Not sure what “day off” means, except that it’s the day you try to cram in all the things you never have time to do on your non-days off.

I started today with good intentions.

I decided to bake something. And that was not a typo, folks. I have a brand new Kitchen Aid stand mixer – an early Christmas present from my wonderful husband who is hoping to be the recipient of the mixer’s magic. One problem. No baking ingredients in the house. When Jordan packed up and moved to Toronto, she took ALL the baking supplies (at least all the good ones), the nice pans (so what if they belong to her), and even the best cookbooks (all I have left are the boring ones with no pictures). I wasn’t in the mood to make a trip to Save-On to buy all the stuff I needed to make chocolate cream pie, which is what I was craving.

Move on to Plan B: prepare a pork loin for supper. Now I have to be honest here and admit that I’ve lived nearly 54 years on this earth and have NEVER cooked a pork loin. The only reason I even had one in the deep freeze was because they were on sale (2 for 1) the last time I bought groceries and I though it would be interesting to try something different. Not knowing exactly what to do with the thing, I resorted to http://www.allrecipes.com to get a few hints. I wouldn’t have had to do that if Jordan hadn’t taken all the good cookbooks. I did find one recipes that looked pretty good, so I modified the marinade somewhat (I cannot stick to a recipe no matter what) and got the pork and the baby potatoes soaking up the good stuff while I continued my day. It was 9:15 am by this time.

Next activity was to deal with some business stuff – potential orders for the store, emails to various people and businesses, etc. That took an hour, and then Seth showed up. We chatted for a while and then walked over to the store. He wanted to get groceries, so I sent Kelsey along with him while I received a shipment that had arrived, priced the new books, rearranged some merchandise, and helped two customers dispose of a good sum of money into my cash register. Kelsey came back and I walked home.

It was time to fulfill my commitment to babysit Caleb and Reece for an hour. They came into the house running . . . and kept on running until I decided I didn’t have the energy to chase after them. Thank the Lord for whoever invented TVs and DVD players – and the kids’ movies to play on them! Caleb and Reecie enjoyed three episodes of Auto B. Good (the Christian version of Disney’s “Cars” movie), and I had peace and quiet.

After supper (the pork loin and roasted potatoes were AWESOME, by the way), it was off to the church for worship band practice. We learned one song really well, another song sort of okay, and a third we just listened to once or twice. I was happy with how the rehearsal went and it rates a Satisfactory. My apologies to the musicians for neglecting to prepare a lead sheet for “A New Hallelujah”.

I came home at 8:15 pm completely done in. Tomorrow I can go to work and relax.

For those who are interested, here is the marinade I used for the pork loin and potatoes:

1/2 cup olive oil
3 cloves garlic – crushed
1/2 medium onion – chopped
1 tsp. thyme
2 tsp. whole peppercorns
1 tsp. salt
1 lb. pork loin (boneless) – cut small slits across the top, every inch or so
15-20 baby potatoes (wash, dry, and leave whole)

I put half the marinade in a zip-lock bag with the potatoes, and the other half in another bag with the pork loin – left it for about 6 hours.

Bake in a shallow roasting pan (no cover) at 350 for about 90 minutes.

Wow, I’m actually sharing a recipe. This is totally out of character.