4th of July

Sometimes, I swear the holiday weeks seem longer and are harder to get through than the regular ones. It's the change in routine. Take this last week, for instance.

Monday was a regular Monday.
Tuesday was Friday, since it was the day before a day off. I like Fridays.
Wednesday was Saturday, since I had the day off. I really like Saturdays.
Thursday was Monday again. This is where it got tough. The second Monday of the week, doubly hard to get my keister into the office.
Friday was, thankfully, Friday.

I did enjoy the 4th. Sandwiched in the middle of the week as it was, I initially planned to keep it pretty low-key, but it turned into a bigger day than I'd planned.

What started it was a yen for baked beans like I remember from when I was a kid. You can't just make those kind of baked beans for just one person, so I picked up the phone and invited over some friends.

With seven people now coming for dinner, I got in touch with my inner chef. I woke up on Wednesday inordinately proud of myself for remembering to set the beans to soak the night before. I dug out some bacon from the freezer, chopped up an onion, mixed in all the ingredients and set it in the crock pot to stew for eight hours.

An hour or so later, I walked into the kitchen and inhaled, expecting the intoxicating aroma of cooking beans, bacon and onion. The stench which assailed my nostrils was not what I was expecting. Clearly, the bacon had gone bad. *Sadness*

Fortunately for my taste buds, I'd thrown an extra bag of navy beans in the cart when I was at the store; a little digging in the pantry uncovered enough ingredients to start over. Looking at the bag of hard beans, I knew my relatively cool and easy afternoon had just come to an end. Beans CAN be cooked in a day, but it involves hours of simmering on the stove top.

That's OK. What's the 4th of July without a little sweat? I spent the next few hours chopping for potato salad and anxiously tracking the progress of the beans, turning up the heat to make sure they softened on schedule. I chopped and precooked the bacon this time. (At least that way, if it was bad, I wouldn't have spoiled the entire new batch of beans.) I browned the onions in the grease, tossed the whole mix back into the crock pot and let it cook on high for the remainder of the afternoon.

Amazingly enough, it all came off (with a little help from my friends, who brought the watermelon and other desserts). Beans, burgers, potato salad, and chips - dinner tasted like a 4th of July dinner SHOULD taste. My inner eight year-old was in heaven.