Sunday, Sunday, Sunday

Sundays are my favorite day. Doug and I get up early enough to watch CBS Sunday Morning, drink coffee and plan what we’re doing (or not doing). This Sunday I got up before Doug and decided to make pancakes. Mainly because I have a box of pancake mix that will expire in August so I’d like to use it up. I used my cast iron Lodge skillet I bought last Thanksgiving to make cornbread in. Every time I use my skillet I think about staying at my Nannie and Pa’s house when I was younger. Nannie is my mom’s mother, my maternal grandmother and Pa is my maternal grandfather. I spent most of my summers at their house out in the county until I was around 13. Nannie let me do nearly anything I wanted to and didn’t mind my ‘cooking’ experiments. I probably wouldn’t be half the cook I am today if it wasn’t for her letting me run wild in her kitchen. Last Thanksgiving I was hosting lunch at my house and I called to get her recipe for cornbread to make cornbread dressing with. It called for bacon drippings but I don’t keep bacon drippings (although I guess I could?) so I winged it. The cornbread turned out okay, but it didn’t taste like hers, probably because I omitted the bacon drippings and my brand new iron skillet isn’t ‘seasoned’ yet.

After pancakes and the news, we spent the rest of our Sunday doing odds and ends and making an ill-fated journey to the grocery store. OMG I hate people in the stores on Sunday. Everyone walks around like they have all the time in the world. I almost drop-kicked two middle-aged women shopping together because every time I turned my cart they were in the aisles blocking my passage, so irritating. I didn’t want to spend my entire Sunday stuck behind the ‘mosey-ers’ at Schnucks. I spent a good portion of the rest of my Sunday in my craft room knitting and listening to This American Life podcasts. I’m working on the Le Slouch beret for my friend Tzili and this martini dishcloth I started forever ago that I’m just tired of looking at. Late afternoon is my favorite time to be in my craft room, the room gets the afternoon sun and its always full of light from about 3:00PM until 5:30 or so.

Earlier in the day I had the idea to make pizza on the grill for dinner. I made pizza dough in the morning so it would have time to rise. I used this recipe from Epicurious for the dough and used suggestions from this article on how to proceed with the grilling. We used mild Italian Chicken Sausage, fresh garlic sautéed in olive oil and shredded mozzarella for the topping. I left off the tomato sauce because the acidity of tomatoes bothers Doug’s scarred esophagus. I made two smaller pizzas instead of one bigger one because I decided it would be easier to manage them. The lesson I learned was that you must watch the dough like a hawk once you put it on the grill because there is a great chance you might get distracted and wander around the yard for 10 minutes while your pizza turns to ash on the grill. The first one on the grill turned out burned on the bottom but the top was okay. When I put the second one on I watched it very closely and it turned out fine. I’ll make them again because I would really like to try a margherita version and a version with pesto. After the burned pizza crust I needed a glass of wine, luckily the friends we had over for dinner Saturday had brought us a bottle of red so I tore into it. I felt much better after a glass.