February 27th, 2011

For a couple of years in the 80’s my Grandma Coco, who was an incredible cook, was having culinary issues with jello.  Yep, I’m officially outting her battle.  She couldn’t get her jello to jell….ever.  It was actually quite comical, but I couldn’t have told her that, she had the anger for her non-jelling jello.  She came out of her slump eventually, but I still think the soupy jello era spooked her a bit.  Why talk about this now?  Well I am having a bit of a slump lately myself.  I have officially pushed the envelope too far and need to regroup.  My pasta sauce is getting bland.  There, I said it.  I have messed around with my go to recipe too much, cutting back on the meat, adding too many veggies, skipping tomato paste, not buying fresh herbs in the winter, and trying to go light on the salt.  My last 3 pasta sauces have been watery and bland.  And tonight was no exception.  It was the night of the Oscars and I wanted to make a Bolognese type pasta sauce…..and added too many veggies, not enough meat, no tomato paste, and resulted in no flavor.   The buck stops here.  My next sauce it going to be a good one or I’ll have to remove my italian tattoo on my back and that costs more money than extra meat and herbs at the grocery store, so that would be dumb.

On the topic of dumb…..tornado sirens are dumb.  They go off too soon, turn off too quickly, then start up again, and again, and again.  Tornado sirens were not told the tale of The Boy who cried Wolf as a child.  That said, when they went off at 11:30 pm and we double checked the news, we took the kids to the basement.  While we were in the basement, our power went out.

Because our tree fell on our power lines. 

Something that is a bigger bummer than bland tomato sauce is no power in February…..or any month for that matter.