We don't say Happy New Year....

... I wonder if we should?

When you work in the Education Field you mark time by when the school year starts and ends not by the regular January to December calendar. So this past week was the first week of the year for me and for many. It was a VERY good week too. This may sound funny to some but what made it so nice was that Lourdes and I were at work by 8:00 (which normally we are there much earlier), we didn't turn the phones on (that didn't stop it from ringing constantly, we just didn't have to answer it), and we kept the doors locked (no enrollments, tee hee!) Think about it... if you could go to work without the outside distractions wouldn't your job be so much less hectic? I know it would be a little hard to do if you were waiting tables or you relied on the public to kick start everything in the morning. Well come to think of it I guess I do rely on the public to kick start us, but at least this week I got to gear up for them, they'll be knocking the doors down in a few more weeks. And by Friday we were enrolling new student's at the rate of one per hour, that will pick up the closer we get to the actual First Day of School.

One of the things I do at work may fall under the category of Event Planning/Catering. I have 4 events to work in the 3 weeks before the actual First Day of School. Five if you want to count making sure an outside group who is meeting at our school has coffee for their meeting (just one more thing to poke into a crevice of my fully packed brain.) I hope I don't forget them.

The first of these meetings was Friday morning, I needed to have Breakfast and lunch for 12. They were meeting at the school. All I needed was food, the Administrators pretty much did all the set up for me. I catered the lunch, which was 4 different salads from a local (fancy schmancy) grocery store that I just needed to pick up. I couldn't make up my mind on what to get them for Breakfast so I decided to just buy ingredients and make it myself... it's just 12 people, it's not like feeding an army. I like to have a variety of things, I don't want anyone to say "Yeah we had that last Tuesday too..."
I just cut up some fruit, made a couple of loaves of Amish Friendship Bread (no picture of the bread, use your imagination...)

and a Sausage and Egg Casserole. How simple is that? I really need an oven in my office so I can serve this when it comes out and is all puffy like a souffle. It's so pretty then. I learned that I'm never going to use bananas again, you just can't keep them from turning brown, and I need to experiment with the bread.... I think it needs more flour. I'll be using the office staff as guinea pigs in the future.

I made a Spring Fruit Charlotte for their dessert. I need a new oven at home too. Ours has a mind of it's own and I'm not going to list all the things that are wrong with it. It's ridiculous. Baking makes me angry these days, because I can't do it to my liking. Jody would say I'm giving it bad vibes but as long as it acts like a ceramics kiln, it's going to get some vibes from me.

I had to take this Charlotte out almost 20 minutes before it was due to be finished because it was starting to burn on top! See where that little drip is on the bottom right of the dish? See that pie shaped untoasted part? That's where I took the kitchen shears and cut the burned edge off! I went all around it and trimmed the burnt, or should I say overly toasted parts. Gggrrrrrr! Then I did a Julia Child repair..... I snowed on it! I covered it with powdered sugar. It was beautiful. Sorry, I forgot to take a picture of it before I served it at school. (Lourdes informed me that the oven in the lounge at school isn't any better than what I have at home and she also said Kat Corra scrapes burned toast on Iron Chefs.) This is another one that should have been baked at school and served warm with vanilla ice cream but we used whipped cream. They liked it! And Cristie told me I can't go into the catering business with Nita and Di just yet I still have work to do at school, catering work. But I do like cooking for people, so maybe someday.

One down 3 to go! Have a good week!