Almost Shabbat

it is 5:30 p.m. in the holy city of zefat.  it is about an hour before candle lighting.  all the food is on the electric platter already.  i had a package of chicken bones that i didn't want to toss so i made a chicken soup last night at about 11:00 p.m.  i don't know if that was the new time or an hour earlier.  all i know is that i didn't get to sleep until after 4:00 a.m.  i drank some tea before i went to sleep.  i wonder if i'm finally feeling the caffeine.

i got up and was pretty tired.  i defrosted the spicy chicken wings for lunch tomorrow and i defrosted some broiled chicken liver for tonight.  i didn't have the energy to walk down to the supermarket  today.  i had 4 small potatoes and a carrot and an onion so i made a small kugel.  i also made white rice with green lentils.  i started out cooking them both separately, but i ended up throwing them together into a pot.  i'm afraid it's a bit of a blob.  i made some fish with a moroccan red sauce and i made cole slaw.  there was only a bit of mayonnaise left in the jar so i added a bit of lemon and olive oil.

i decided not to serve the pesach peanut cookies, that i bought yesterday for this shabbat.  after all, we still have another 2 shabbatons to get through before the seder.  i baked a whole wheat honey cake using date honey.  i also made some corn muffins.  i took a  package of strawberries and a banana from the kids' fridge and i made strawberry sorbet.  i bought sunflower seeds and i have beer in the fridge so we are good to go.

i don't know how the kids will deal with no cholent tomorrow.  i have sweet and spicy wings and kugel and rice pilaf.  they'll just have to cope.  i couldn't find any chicken in the store yesterday to make a cholent.  if it was just me alone, i'd have a tuna sandwich.

in between cooking and baking, i managed to clean both dairy and pareve ovens.  the only problem is that i shorted out the electric dairy oven which shorted out the electricity in the house.  all is well now but i won't know for sure if i killed my jumbo dairy oven or not, for a few days.  i'm letting it dry out.  i couldn't help myself.  the ovens were warm so i started spraying them with oven cleaner.  i actually got a good whiff of the stuff at one point and luckily, didn't choke.

i cleaned out the rest of the gadget drawers and reorganized them, which is always a pleasure.  i still need to finish the fridge.  most of the parts are on the counter.  hopefully on sunday, i'll get around to it.  i am under a lot of pressure to face the pigeon population upstairs.  just now i had two of them sitting on my window ledge watching me type.  i think this means war.