Diary 10|25, 26|2014: Excavation And Consolidation Of Hot Sauce

[title type="h5"]Saturday, October 25, 2014. Excavation And Consolidation Of Hot Sauce.[/title] Mary Ann and I have a nice breakfast at Mattina Bella, my favorite Saturday routine. She has her usual Country Boy omelette (all the breakfast meat in the house), and I have a a moister omelette of Italian sausage, marinara sauce, mozzarella, peppers and onions. Very good, but at the end of the eating I find myself with a residual hunger for bacon. I ask for a single slice, and it is brought. Being a regular customer who tips high makes for a very nice life. I have only an hour of radio to do. Mary Ann's demands are to take the leashed dogs for a walk with her. The latter is not getting any easier. The dog Barry is so mighty that he twists my bad ankle more than I feel good about. The dog Suzie is small and less powerful, but can also yank me around pretty well. Mary Ann is still proposing that we fence in all the Cool Water Ranch acreage. But where are these fence installers she's always talking about? Before, concurrent with, and after the above tastes, I undertake a project on my mind for years: clearing out the pantry shelves, disposing of the vast supplies of surplus, out-of-code, unappealing, and otherwise worthless stock. We have so much of such stuff that it's literally falling off the shelves and covering the floor. But Thanksgiving is a month away, and our kitchen's functionality is crippled by all this crapple. I begin by consolidating dozens of jars and packets of Creole-Cajun seasoning. One half-gallon jar of salt-free, and about a gallon and a half of salted. Then I do the same job on about 40 of the 165 bottles of hot sauce. I break it up into sauce made with habanero and other super-hot peppers, and those in the hotness range of Tabasco and milder. From this I get five good-looking bottles that make for a nice display. I hope the mixture is chemically stable and doesn't explode. Those two operations alone take up the rest of my day until my back gives out. By then it's dinnertime. I am persuaded by the rest of the Cool Water Ranch crew to join them at their kneejerk place, La Carreta. Three tubs of choriqueso for them. That order is very far over the top, especially since I stopped eating more than one flour tortilla's worth. I have a more sensible lunch of the excellent bean soup and a single cheese enchilada with molé poblano for me, The molé is still not on the menu, but this makes five times that they've served it to me anyway, on dishes ranging from roast chicken to cheese-and-onion enchiladas. [divider type=""] [title type="h5"]Sunday, October 26, 2014. Jars And Bottles. The Chimes. [/title] I can now stand in front of the food-storage side of our pantry, a huge improvement. All the hot sauce and seasonings--plus eleven (!) bottles of barbecue sauce--take up less than two shelves. I continue consolidating half-full jars, bottles and bags of honey, pasta, olive oil, vinegar, rice, Trey Yuen's XO sauce, Karo syrup, Nestle's Quik, cornmeal, flours, and maple syrup in bottles shaped like maple leaves. By the end of the day, one and a half shelves are empty and clean, where an incipient and inevitable avalanche was before. And not one thing is on the floor in front of that section. I think it even impressed the Marys. Next week: the other, bigger part of the job, starring 130 wine glasses, seven springform pans, and what may be several thousand plastic containers. [caption id="attachment_32678" align="alignnone" width="480"] Grilled oysters at The Chimes.[/caption] The gang goes to The Chimes, because it's such a nice day. A dozen grilled oysters and a blackened shrimp remoulade salad. The oysters provide everyone else with slices of French bread and plenty of garlic butter. Mary Ann has two or three of the bivalves themselves but all the rest are left to me. Life could be worse.