Adventures in Art, Culinary and Otherwise

Today was a first.  I went to a cooking class. I'm not much of a foodie, but my friend has a friend who puts on cooking classes, and she was doing a Valentine's dinner, and my friend wanted me to go with her, and it was a good excuse to take a half day off work, and the class included eating, so I figured what the heck.  I learned how to make chicken Oscar, how to sugar walnuts, and how to make a Hollandaise sauce in the blender that you don't really have to cook. Will I ever actually make chicken Oscar on my own time?  Who knows?

  THIS:

is what most of MY gourmet cooking looks like.  Chicken Crockpot.  With mashed potatoes (real) and gravy made out of a powder I buy at Sams.  And yeah, it was delicious.  I don't usually take pictures of dinner.  But I happened to snap this one  the other night, just because I was raving to the kids about how great it looked, and they started harassing me about turning into one of those annoying people who post food pictures on Facebook, which I am NOT turning into, but just to scare them a little, I took a picture anyway.

In other adventures, Olivia and I spent the night making her Valentines for school tomorrow.

My other friend at work and I came up with this idea on our own.  We had the cards printed and put them in little baggies with the tootsie rolls.  This is as creative as I ever have been for Valentines.  Most years we hit up Walmart the night before for cartoon valentines and conversation hearts.

Also tonight, Olivia was working on memorizing her seven times tables.  At first, she was mostly just complaining about memorizing them, and whining about how terrible she was at math because she couldn't remember any of them.  Then  I promised her I would buy her a pony if she gets them all memorized by tomorrow night.  Not a real pony.  Just a little one. She suddenly turned into a math genius, and had them memorized in a matter of minutes.

Pushing the right buttons.  It's how I roll.