Updates here & there

Since I know you've all been on pins and needles waiting for me to do a little follow up on some previous posts, (said with a dose of heavy sarcasm) I thought I'd catch you up on things here around the House of Crackers:

Supper Gourmet Club
You'll be happy to know that the dinner we hosted for Supper Gourmet Club on Saturday was a success. Yea! I'm sorry to say that I have no pictures to share of the evening because I was a bit stressed out about frying up my first ever batch of chicken for a group of people with discriminating palettes. (of course it could also be said I was too also too busy sampling martinis...)

The chicken turned out both crispy and juicy (which it should have been considering it spent 24 hours brining in a salt water bath, followed by another 24 hours soaking in buttermilk). It was a fun night filled with delicious southern favorites and tasty martinis. I think the star of the evening was the Bourbon Glazed Bread Pudding served with brown sugar ice cream (Haagan-Daz, I will be soon be writing a love sonnet for your brown sugar ice cream). Sweet, sweet bourbon bread pudding, where have you been all my life?

Now I just have to figure out how to get the smell of fried chicken, bacon & lard out of my house. It smelled delicious as it was all cooking Saturday night, but 2 days of living in a place that smells like KFC is starting to bring me down a little. A friend of mine suggested leaving out bowls of white vinegar & that seems to have helped a bit. If I ever make another batch of fried chicken again, I'll do it in a warmer month so I can open all the windows to air the place out a bit.

If I can't get the smell out soon, Santa will be expecting a plate of fried chicken when he comes down the chimney instead of cookies.


The Dining Room Dilemma
As a follow up to my post about my complete lack of decorating prowess, I wanted to let you know that we decided to replace the curtains in the dining room. Since the "Harry Potter" red plaid curtains in the room seemed to make Mr. Crackers' a little anxious when paired with all of the other patterns in the room, we decided to replace them with solid green panels. Of course it was also considerably less expensive than option #2 which was replacing the area rug. We hoped the new curtains would help us tie the conflicting patterns of the newly covered chairs with the patterned area rug.



Here's the result:


And from another angle:


Did it work? Hmm, good question. I will tell you that these green curtains definitely work with all of the patterns in the room better than the plaid ones they are replacing, but I'll also tell you that I definitely shouldn't be allowed in a fabric store again anytime soon.

Misplaced priorities on my to-do list
And finally, just thought I'd share what I did while K was napping today. I'm sure you are thinking I was working on the normal things that keep us all busy this time of year: writing Christmas cards or Christmas shopping or even starting to pull together my son's 7th birthday party which will be here in just a few weeks...

Nope, I spent my "down" time this afternoon organizing my spices & putting little tiny labels on them so I could actually find them quickly without doing my usual 5 minute spicy scavenger hunt.



I am very excited about the labels, don't they make it so much easier to find the spice you're looking for (yes I know I am dork, we've discussed that before haven't we)? In my defense, I will tell you that my Mom was performing the same task today & put the idea in my head so I will shift the blame to her. I'm just saying that if your Christmas cards are late this year, now you know why. It's worth though isn't it?

Thanks for the idea Mom. Hope you got your cabinets done too!