Loss of kitchen mojo

 This is my Effortless Cardigan by Hannah Fettig of Knitbot fame.  It's my first sweater of the year and I've worn it consistent since it came off the needles.  I think this is going to replace my Emerald cardigan because it's thin enough that I can fit it under my new gray coat (the other one bunches under the arms and restricts movement in the smaller coat).  Please forgive these lousy photos.  They're just another example of the loss of Mojo that I'm experiencing around here this week.

 Where am I hit the hardest by the Mojo loss??  In the kitchen.  According to Aaron (who helped me figure out this analogy) if I were a major league baseball player, I'd be batting about 175 right now.  The buffalo wings came out great, as did the blue-cheese dressing.  The waffles from last night tasted good, but I missed a crucial step that affected the overall texture (they should have been crisper on the outside and fluffier on the inside).  The home made ice-cream I tried tonight turned out like a milk shake instead of ice-cream, so into the freezer it went (at least it tasted good).  The sour dough bread?  Don't even ask about the sour dough bread.  It was supposed to be so easy, but I've screwed it up for the last two straight days, and the started was off at first too but I think I've worked that out.

 Turns out that after waiting for 2-5 days for the starter to be ready, then 1 hour for the wet ingredients to sit and rise, then 1 1/2 hours for the dough to rise, you have to prep the loaves and then put them into the fridge for ANOTHER 8-12 HOURS!!  Really.  I knew I was gonna have problems when I discovered that I'd only put 1 tsp of honey into the wet ingredients instead of the 1 Tbs, but I hoped I could work past that.  Then I mixed the flour into the wet ingredients, all the while wondering when the butter and eggs was supposed to go in, and put it in the oven to rise.  This friends, is what happens when one is tired and lack of a printer necessitates copying the recipe by hand...I missed a critical step.  At about this point, I called several friends hoping to ask if I should even bother to proceed to baking...after all, I had no eggs or butter or salt, but I've made other bread recipes that didn't call for eggs (it could work, right?).  No one answered.  Next step: call Mom.  Her advice: bake it anyway and see what happens...after all, it could work, right?  So I go in and get ready to bake the bread, and scroll down the recipe looking for the temperature, and that's when I see that I can't even bake these blasted loaves till tomorrow morning at the earliest!  I mean, really!  So they're in the fridge doing what ever the heck it is that they need 12 hours to do, and tomorrow I'll start all over with fresh flour and stuff and try again.  I'll bake these and if they don't work out, I'll have properly prepared dough waiting in the wings.  That's the plan anyway.

At least the Swedish meatballs & rice worked out.  Probably because it was store-bought, packaged gravy.