This and that and other stuff…

I had a hellish week. Hellish, I tell you. I am not going to go into it at the moment, but suffice to say – sulphur, brimstone, the works. Thank God for the weekend.

I got a sudden impulse last week to re do my entire web design website from html to CMS. What was I thinking? Who knows, but never being one to let a good impulse go to waste, I instantly dove right into it, thinking to myself “This is going to take a few hours”. Fast forward to the next day, where it’s 3 in the morning and I am over caffeinated, sleep deprived, and hallucinating header.php code. I crawled into bed at about 3:30, and I dreamed about re designing my website.

Seriously. I dreamed I was editing widgets and hand writing html, all in mind numbing detail. At one point, I bolted awake thinking “I can’t edit that Logo text – it will throw off the alignment of the entire menu!”. I think Sean smacked me in the head with a pillow until I stopped whimpering and went back to sleep. Check out the new look – http://www.frogdogdesign.com

The last time I remember dreaming so vividly about work was after a fateful weekend I spent at age 13 picking strawberries for spare cash, after which I dreamed all night for a week about picking endless fields of berries.

This morning after a misadventure in which my friend Paula and I headed out on 2 hour drive to take pictures of a dog that wasn’t home, I picked up a loaf of fresh baked Mennonite bread and a few buttertarts. I labour under the illusion that if it comes from a tiny bakery, it will obviously be ever so much better than food from a big supermarket.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Commercial butter tarts? Flaky and creamy. Home baked butter tarts? Almost always inedible and dry. Lesson not learned once again. The bread, on the other hand, was still warm when I bought it, and is currently sitting in my fridge marinating itself into a batch of what I fondly call ‘Drunken French Toast’. Sean and I will be eating it for breakfast tomorrow, and here’s the recipe, in case anyone else wants to try it.

Drunken French Toast

1 loaf bread in 1-inch slices
3 cups whole milk
3 eggs
3 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
Booze

I pour in about a 1/2 cup of whatever the hell I have in my cupboard. Tonight, it was a bottle of Godiva’s chocolate liqueur that neither Sean or I can remember buying. Possibly we inherited it when we bought the house. I took a few slugs of it, just in case (safety first!), and it tasted just fine.

1. Generously grease a 9×13-inch baking dish with butter.
2. Arrange bread in two tightly-packed layers in the pan.
3. Whisk milk, eggs, sugar, salt and booze and pour over the bread. Sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar.
4. Wrap tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight. The bread will absorb all of the milk custard while you sleep. Drink rest of booze, fall asleep at kitchen island.
5. Wake in morning with hellacious hangover, dreading thought of breakfast.
6. Look in fridge, think ‘damn, it’s a shame to waste all that bread’. Bake at 425 for 30 minutes, or until puffed and golden. Make large pot of coffee, take three advil, pray for death. Delicious mell of French Toast pulls you out of pit of despair and back into warm light of day.
7. Cut into generous squares and serve with maple syrup, fresh fruit, powdered sugar or all of the above. Say prayer of thanks for redeeming power of egg soaked boozy bread, amen.