Rain, food, and things I didn’t sign on for as a mother

One of those almost-rainy, dull Saturdays when you stay home alone all day and try not to feel sorry for yourself. My solution was to read, and I spent much of the day finishing The Velveteen Daughter, which I am to review for Story Circle Network. I even roughed out the review. But that historical novel is not light reading and didn’t do much to lighten my mood

My kids are in their forties, and I should not be worrying about them. But I am. One is periodically hiding in a closet with his family in Tomball because they get one tornado warning after another. Spinoffs from Hurricane Harvey. Another in Austin said this morning it’s just an ordinary rainstorm, but I’m afraid she’s in for a rude awakening. The third is with his family in Boulder, delivering the oldest daughter to college—surely a bittersweet moment for that close family. And the local one? She woke with a splitting sinus headache. I guess Harvey gets all of us one way or another, though we’ve had only one brief sprinkle of rain.

I did keep one eye on the TV (with the sound muted) for hurricane reports and watched the national news avidly. The devastation from landfall is awful, but they say the worst is yet to come—flooding over the next few days as Harvey lingers almost in place and dumps inches and inches of rain. I think of the Tomball kids again, with a stable next door that becomes a sea of mud, with a lot of horse poop in it. And the snakes that may come sliding out of their small lake. Of course, being a mother, my mind can go quickly to the worst-case scenario, for which Colin would scorn me.

Cooking always brightens my day, so I made myself a new recipe for supper. A baked egg on a bed of toast, spinach, crumbled bacon, and thin slices of cheese. Think of it--all the food groups at once. Drizzled a little cream over the top because the original recipe said to do that, but I’m not sure what good it did. With a single burner kitchen, I had to cook dinner in several steps—make the toast, sauté the bacon that I’d already diced rather than trying to crumble after it cooked—that doesn’t work well for me because bacon doesn’t cook evenly. Then I sautéed the spinach ever so quickly in a tiny bit of bacon grease, and assembled the whole thing in a ramekin. I had to finish with the hot plate before I could turn on the toaster-oven to heat 400, but that gave me time to do some dishes and put away food. When the oven was 400, I put my dinner in for 15 minutes—perfection! The egg white was set nicely but the yolk still runny.

If I ever do a cookbook I will emphasize that some of the recipes must be done with a love of cooking, because they are neither quick nor easy. But for me it was fun, and the result was scrumptious. I had found a recipe, but the cheese was my addition, as was the substitution of a half slice of sourdough toast, well buttered, for an English muffin. And I had to reduce the recipe to serve one instead of four, but by now that’s old hat.

Now what to do with the rest of my evening? Read, that’s what. When I was deep in the review book, which did call me back with a siren call, I occasionally felt I had to escape from that intense world to a cozy mystery. Now I’m free to read that cozy without interruption.