Sorry, I’ve been slacking!

I know, I know, I’m so sorry to not have followed up with a post about the Maine trip!  Let’s see how well my memory serves me…

After packing my clothes and camping gear I hit the fridge, I went with an “Everything Go’s!” attitude because we all know how much I love to eat!  I went to pick up my sister and after packing all her gear + food, we were off to Whole Foods to fill in the blanks.  I can’t really remember what we bought but I do remember we had way more food than camping gear (the whole backseat was food!)  We made it to Camp around 9pm and unpacked our coolers and set up our tent.   The next morning we ate yogurt and berries (my parents had brought some blackberries my cousin picked from his yard (in another part of Maine), they were by far the BEST blackberries I ever ate!  I ate as many as I could during the weekend and brought the rest home with me 🙂  During breakfast we had to field a few questions about food, luckily my parents had already been there for a few days so everyone had already heard the basics.  I still find it interesting how hard it is for Baby Boomers to grasp what “organic” is.  My father thinks if you got it at Whole Foods, it’s organic.  At least he can define the word, my sister’s stepfather offers us plenty of ‘organics’, apparently anything that had to be picked is organic!  My mother, as much as she tries, hates when things don’t work out so she resorts to … fibbing, for lack of a better word.  Now, she isn’t flat-out lying about things, she just wants everything to be perfect and if I say I am going to pass on something, that is not perfect.  So she tells me the salad dressing is organic (which usually just means it came from Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods)so I am in the habit of casually checking her labels – Albertson’s.  She brought this from Florida.  Not only isn’t it organic, but it’s not even GMO free!

Overall, Maine was a success, more than I thought it would be.  The only issue I had was getting over how STUPID my sister and I can be sometimes!   You know how traditional food holds a place in your heart?  Well every time I visit Camp, I eat a whoopie pie – but ONLY at Camp!  I have seen them sold around here but know they aren’t the same and have reserved that as a special treat for Maine.  My sister and I have noticed whoopie pies at Whole Foods and have discussed them a number of times; wouldn’t you think one of us would have said “Hey, we should bring whoopie pies with us!”?  Well, we didn’t.  Saturday night after everyone was done with their dinner (yet another Maine specialty, ham & cheese dagwoods from the corner store… I can taste it as I type, what a disappointment to miss!) they broke out the whoopie pies.  My sister and I took our snack bag to our tent and pigged out on our own snacks and then lite a fire and enjoyed (approved) s’mores! 

Being back at home should have returned some sanity to my life but I found that the opposite was happening.  I had the day off Monday so I went to the beach, I left at 1:00 because I had recipes swimming in my head that I wanted to bring to fruition.  I tried so hard to get a menu and shopping list together to no avail.  I went through Trader Joe’s and came out empty-handed.  I went home and ended up sulking on my couch the entire night.  This mood was still with me on Tuesday and Wednesday, Thursday I tried really hard but when I found out PYO blueberries were done for the season, I crumbled.  Summer’s over.  (This statement almost brings a tear to my eye.)  It was my parents’ last weekend so I stayed there until late Sunday afternoon.  I attempted to do some food shopping on my way home but I still hadn’t shaken the overwhelmed feeling and I just couldn’t get my thoughts together.  Luckily I felt more myself when I woke up on Monday and was able to do my shopping in pieces throughout the week with one big shop on Saturday, after visiting my sister’s mother’s garden, of course. 

I spent from 11:30 – 6:30 Sunday preparing food!  I made a spaghetti sauce with the Roma tomatoes that are really popping right now, along with the fresh garlic, onions, peppers and basil (and chorizo); I am pretty proud of my (1st ever!) from-scratch sauce!  I made some chorizo and peppers which was also a first-time try and it came out great!  I was able to make enough zucchini mush for 8 loafs of zucchini bread, 2 batches I froze for winter baking and 2 batches I was going to make yesterday, one to eat, one to freeze… well, 35 minutes into my first batch the smell overtook my apartment and I was having flashbacks of childhood, I couldn’t wait to enjoy my own freshly baked zucchini bread!!  By the time the timer went off, I was prepared to devour one entire loaf – until I opened the oven and saw my creation 😦   Instantly I remembered making this before and it came out horribly, it looked exactly the same this time!  How can something smell sooooo good but be soooooo bad!?  Now, being the avid baker that I have become, I knew there was something terribly wrong with my recipe; I checked the internet and decided a call to Mom was in order.  “What about the flour?” she said “Yeah, do you use flour?”  “Of course I do”, she says, “it wouldn’t be very good without it!” (I think she thought I was trying to avoid using flour)  “Nice, thanks for sabotaging all my efforts to make zucchini bread! You said 3 more eggs, not 3 cups of flour!!!”  Oh boy, did we laugh at that!  🙂  So I made a trip to Whole Foods this morning for flour (I decided to go with a mixture of whole grain and white flour) and I will try again this evening, although it has been a long, rainy Monday and I am thinking dinner might be enough effort for this girl tonight!