Comfort Food

Soft pillows of happiness. It's that time of year again when I turn out two or three batches of perogies in preparation for the Holiday Eating Frenzie my family calls Christmas. Mikey was home sick yesterday so I came home in the afternoon to keep an eye on him and thought it would be the perfect opportunity for perogy batch #1. I pulled out Mom's dough recipe (it's one of those passed down for three or four generations) and went to work. 10 cups of flour, eight pounds of potatoes, a huge block of Old Cheddar, blood, sweat and tears. I made 15 dozen and they are super-wicked-awesome-tasty. Of course Mikey and I had to try a couple for dinner last night....quality testing and control don'cha know. I would like to say they cured his illness, but alas, comfort food isn't a cure-all...it's just that - COMFORT. Yummy, hot, cheesy pillows of comfort.

Mikey's got bronchitis. Hack, hack, hack....sniff.....blow....hack....yuck. Poor thing. He's been sick for over a week now. Everyone is sick at work too. I managed to fight thorough the week without catching the horrible cold...until now. STUPID, STUPID aaaaaaaand STUPID! While cleaning up the kitchen last night, I started to feel that little tickle in the back of my throat. Oh, no! I crawled in to bed with flannel PJ's, a long sleeve shirt, a sweatshirt and two extremely hot little furnaces - The Puggies - in hopes of sweating it out before it fully arrived. Guess what? I woke up this morning aaaaaand............I have a cold. CRAP!!!! Double CRAP!!!! Double CRAP ON A STICK!!!!

So, my plan for the day is to lay on the couch and watch a movie with my puggies and my perogies.

Feed a cold? I think that's what it is.

Baby it's cold outside!

I can't believe how cold it is...okay, wait, I can't believe how cold it feels. I hate that transition from later fall to winter. The first day it hits the -10ºc mark and everyone starts running around digging out their mitts, hats and scarves...that's when you know there is no hope and winter is on it's way.

But, the upside is that there is snow. I do like snow. It makes everything look so clean and peaceful. I love being outside at night after a fresh snowfall when it is crisp and the moon is bright. It is silent. It is the silence that is perfect, refreshing and calming. It is the cold that you see your breath in. It is the crispness and the cool blue that falls over everything that makes me like winter.

The Puggies, on the other hand, aren't too happy with the outside lately. This is Stella's first winter and I don't think she knew what to do when I opened the door at 7:00 the other morning. She bounded down the stairs to the door and promptly stopped...well, her front end did anyway. When her back end caught up to her front she did a kind of summer salt out the door in to the snow, jumped up, turned tail and headed back to the door. Guinness on the other hand sniffed...sniiiiiiffffed....sniffed, sneezed and decided it was okay to proceed. When they finally made it to the back yard, it was a Puggy Winter Wonderland Free for All and they chased each other, rolled in the fluffy white that had covered the ground and then both came in looking like wet rats.

I guess that's what it's like for us all...a few sniffs, a quick adjustment to the icy chill and then back to living in the deep freeze for the next few months. Everything still, everything silent, everything calm.

Pug-o-ween

Days late, but finally here are the Puggy Halloween pics. Guinness the Lobster and Stella the Lizard. It was a total struggle to get the costumes on them, and an even bigger fight to keep them on. After a bit Guinness didn't really care as he had a new, green, moving Lizard toy to play with. Poor Stella...Ginny thought she was a new toy he could wrestle with.

And how did they really REALLY feel about the costumes?

They were quite happy once they had torn them off and conquered them!

The pumpkins at the top of the pictures were mine. I love carving pumpkins, but by the time I got around to it this year, I was soo tired I kept messing them up, cutting off pieces that weren't supposed to be cut off and eventually having to carve something simple on the opposite side. LAME!!! At any rate, they turned out okay...nothing special like I usually do, but okay.