One week to go, Saturday from hell, the inside of my freezer, and obsession

Sunday, Sunday, Sunday.

What an absolutely exhausting weekend. Saturday, mostly, but Sunday has been the whipped cream on top. With less than one week until closing and moving, we are scrambling to prepare ourselves (because winter is coming... Game of Thrones starts tonight... I'm excited...)

Also... please forgive any prattling or glaring grammatical errors, I am very much the tired blogger right now.

So, I woke up bright and early at 8am on Saturday morning to this:

A lovely day to say the least. But pupman had his annual vet appointment so we had to go.

On our way, the weather made our drive so very pleasant (and Bo smell like roses and daisies... if by roses and daisies you would mean wet dog). I can't tell if Bo is more excited about the car ride himself or if he is just abuzz with anticipation at where the car ride is taking him. He is pretty much unstoppable if he believes there is a car in his future. And once in the car, he is really only few clicks down on the doggy freak out scale. But we got there and had a good visit and got home without much incident.

This gave me enough time to grab something to eat and put my feet up before we headed back out on the town. This time, my colorful companion was the one and only boyface!

We started by stopping at our realtor's office and signing some final papers. Yay we are so ready for closing it hurts!

Then we went to Salvation Army to try to find a dresser. We just got a new Salvation Army in our town and it is magnificently and frighteningly HU-MUNG-OUS!

It just went on and on! And there was so much stuff! And so, so very many people. They had about a million buffet hutches and a ton of couches, but no dressers (sad panda) so we trolled around in the randomness for a few minutes before heading back out into the pristine weather for a ride to Harris Teeter.

Where we focused on very important things. In reality, I did need quite a few things because I am making my WORLD FAMOUS baked ziti with my WORLD FAMOUS pasta sauce.

Famous in my world anyways. We got all we needed including a visit from a mustached man who let us taste and buy some of his local Italian sausage and watched him give out mustaches to little girls. Ha. Giggle.

Whew... it's a lot less exhausting writing about this then it was to do it all. But it is all very exhausting to write all this. That's all for halftime, let's keep going.

This is the guy with the sausage (giggle giggle) and the mustache (giggle giggle giggle). If you live in the DC metro area you should check it out though, pretty tastey.

And this guy with his mustache! We're only to the third game of the first round of the playoffs! This guy is gonna get a lot furrier... Lol let me tell you how thrilled I am... :) I love my guy and you know it!

A quick trip to check out the new ABC Store (and buy liquor) and off we were back home to make pasta sauce and pack our brains out!!

The pasta sauce is something that my mom taught me how to make. We are from upstate New York and although we are not Italian... it was basically a huge part of our diet before moving down here and is something my mom has stuck with. Making large vats of pasta sauce and freezing is a monthly project and we eat pasta a lot.


So here it is, a step by step of the not so secret and incredibly simple but fairly time consuming method of pasta sauce making that we subsist on in our house. You will never go back to simple sauce again.

I start with onions, garlic, ground beef, and ground Italian sausage (I usually go with mild and I prefer ground. I feel like hot is just an overwhelming flavor and I feel that sliced sausage doesn't meld as well when you're eating it. You either get a mouthful of beef or a mouthful of sausage, not a full taste of the whole thing.)

So here is my giant vat of very hot meat (that's what she said?):

I used a little bit of olive oil to cook the onions and garlic before adding the meat this time... but it doesn't really matter. The fat in the meats gives you all the lube you need to caramelize the onions and garlic. But any oils, fats, or liquids will all be mixed together anyway. (See how specific this recipe is?)

Then we have our tomatoes:

(Can I show brand names? do I care?) My mom will sometimes boil and skin tomatoes, but I am both lazy and short-ish (ha) on time so I just got some diced canned. Tomato paste to thicken it up a little. I don't really have any brand loyalty when it comes to any of these things. I try to buy a pasta sauce that is just a basic traditional or classic flavor, and whatever is on sale. I have used a lot of different sauces but because you're adding so much to it, they all ending up tasting the same. This is where personal preference and personal taste will come into play.

So these all get dumped unceremoniously on top of the meat. So unceremoniously, in fact, that you don't even take a picture for your blog.

You move on to the next step, which is to add what BF refers to infamously as THE LEAF!

Bay leaves. Do not eat them, they taste awful. But they add flavor when cooked into things. Kind of like onions.

I put these in with the tomato stuff because the longer they cook the more flavor they will impart into the sauce. BF did not find out the whole "don't eat them" thing until after he started eating my cooking. He says he always gets the leaf. I make sure to always save one just for his plate :).

Then I round up the usual suspects.

Rosemary (this is actually rosemary my mom grew and dried for me. awesome) Basil. Oregano. Parsley. The parsley isn't necessary, it adds more color than flavor. But I had it so I threw it in. I would say the Basil and Oregano are the most important pieces, but the rosemary is worth it. These go in by the handful and by taste. Remember that the longer the sauce cooks, the more the flavors will meld and come out. So I usually put some in and then taste it a few hours later, then see if it needs more. It's also good to have some garlic powder on hand in case the five cloves of garlic you put in at the beginning have not made it suitably non-vampiric. (I heart garlic)

And then it sits like this, simmering, for as long as possible. All day if you can stand to be stuck at home with it. You could theoretically do it in a crock pot I guess, we just never have and mine is packed. Besides, unless you have a giant crockpot it's not going to hold this amount. That's where the awesomeness of the above stockpot comes in. (Martha who?)

I want to say that I got the pasta sauce all mixed in and simmering, it was about mmm... 4ish. I ended up letting it cook until after 8. Not as long as I would have wanted, but good enough.

At this point my master list looked about like this:

Fairly satisfactory. The things that didn't get crossed off can get done in time. I needed to pack so I popped myself a beer and got moving.

Pictures of packing aren't very interesting, and probably would have just messed up my motivation. So I only stopped to take a picture of this.

How cool right? I wanted to light them but Hubs said we should save them and light them in the new place. We will christen our new house but light things on fire inside of it. Sounds like a plan...

So I put them where I wouldn't lose them in the next week.

Baha.

Any who, after packing up several boxes, drinking a few drinks, and flinging pasta sauce on the ceiling

It was time to tupperware it and freeze it.

See why stockpot trumps crockpot? It's a simple volume issue (that's volume right? you know what I mean!). This is probably more than a months worth of sauce, now that I have the stockpot and can make a full batch. And we also haven't been in a huge pasta roll recently... but now that we have so much sauce available we might be.

And this is now our freezer. You can tell a lot about a family by the innards of certain storage areas. I think the freezer is definitely one of them. I, like my mother, freeze pretty much everything and make it last. Note: several bags of ice, I use this in the summer to make sweet iced tea. This, I believe, is the left overs from daiquiri night... Bagels (top right hand corner) brought back home from New York from my mom. It's a treat we don't get down here very often in Virginia. They are just made different back home.

There isn't actually that much stuff in this freezer, it just looks tight because of the bags of ice... and the fact that the entire top layer of our wedding cake is sitting their hogging up the back corner awaiting our first anniversary. And haunting me.

And yes, we keep liquor in our freezer. Nothing better than ice cold vodka. And the constant reminder that you have it every time you go for an ice cube...

So that's it. That was all Saturday. And then Sunday... Sunday mom and I moved a million boxes into her garage. It seemed like a million anyway. I'm so tired of boxes and moving. And there still seems to be SO MUCH STUFF!!


My more immediate concern is getting in some relax time and counting down the T minus 47 minutes until the Game of Thrones premier!! So, I leave you with this:

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!