I made My Captain a Rib Eye steak in a Whiskey Cream Sauce today.  I found it in Ree Drummond’s cookbook “The Pioneer Woman Cooks”.

Usually I like her recipes, but I have a small beef (ahem) with her about her use of the term “generously” as a definable amount.

You see, I was supposed to ‘generously’ salt the meat before I seared it.  And I was also to ‘generously’ season the whiskey sauce with salt and pepper as I reduced and thickened it.

But see, if nothing else, I’m a generous person.  I may be fat, I may be stupid, I may even, on occasion, be dorky, but miserly I most emphatically am not.  I am one of the most generous-hearted persons you will ever meet.

I have to be to make up for all the rest of those deficits above.

So when I sprinkled the salt on generously, man, I SPRINKLED IT ON.  I mean, I turned that Rib-Eye steak into salt-pork steak.  And my whiskey cream sauce was so salty, I made the dead sea look diluted. (Exaggeration is like a bizillion times more interesting than understatement, don’t you agree?)

It was horrific.  I could barely eat it, and I can eat just about anything.

And My Captain, the man who puts up with so much crap from me already, didn’t complain.  I apologized profusely as we sat down to our quiet candle-lit meal.  But you know what he said?

“It’s ok.  I needed to replace my electrolytes anyways.”

I guess if I’m not famously known for my smoke-producing casseroles, maybe I’ll get known far and wide for my electrolyte-replacing steak dinners. Like a new meat-flavored Gatorade.

I’ll find my own little niche in life yet, just you wait.

So my brother, Graham, came into town for my mother’s birthday this week.  My kids love their Uncle Graham.  He has a wicked sense of humor.  And he doesn’t get to come very often, so when he does make it down here, it’s a special occasion.

Put together Mom’s Birthday, and Uncle Graham visiting, and boy howdy is it a special day!  This calls for an extra-special dinner, so I rolled up my sleeves, and made a casserole with anything (read: everything) I could find, and copious amounts of butter and cream. We’re talking rice, chicken, ham, bacon, broccoli, cheese, ….all the things that make life happy.

Now, see, usually I’d put a cookie sheet under a casserole dish to catch any spills.  But this time it didn’t seem like the dish was so full that it would be necessary.

Yeah….that was a serious mis-calculation.

The smell told me so.

It also told me that maybe, perhaps, it was potentially possible that I might have used a slightly excessive amount of butter and cream.

You should have seen alarming amounts of smoke spewing out of the oven vents as that grease hit the bottom of the crankin’ hot oven.

I would like to take this moment to review the importance of the efficacy of oven fans.

But we don’t have time.

So let’s take stock of my situation:

• We have a strong smell of burning food.
• We have a heavy show of smoke.
• My husband is a firefighter.
• My brother is in town which happens like, once a year, so I’d like to impress him if at all possible.
• AND, my mother’s birthday meal is in question at this point.

What did I do?

Did I panic?  Did I cry?  Did I suggest we go out to dinner instead?

No sirree, Bob.

I acted like nothing was amiss, as if it was absolutely, totally normal to have the entire downstairs of the cottage filled with lung-choking smoke.  And God bless my family, they played along.  I don’t know if it was because they were being kind, or if it was an indictment of my cooking in general…. as if all of my meals do this.  But either way, they were just going on about their business, like “there is nothing to see here folks…move along.”

All, that is, except for Uncle Graham.  The funny one.

“The house isn’t burning down, right? We know this for sure, right?”

This of course was all the invitation Critter and Varmint needed to start snickering.  And Grandma was not far behind.

My Captain reached up and turned the kitchen ceiling fan up to high-speed.

(Let me insert here that I always, ALWAYS keep my kitchen ceiling fan on low, just to keep air moving comfortably.  So if there were, say, an ungodly build-up of dust, grease, and other indefinable particles on the fan, I would be ignorant of it.  That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it.)

So My Captain reaches up and turns the kitchen ceiling fan on high.  Uncle Graham is standing next to me in the kitchen, he’s just made the joke about the house burning down as we choke on the grease smoke, and as the fan begins to speed up, all this CRAP (for lack of a better term) comes snowing down on us from the fan.  It was like our own Mt. St. Helen ash falling down all around us.

And not just a little bit.

It’s a good thing my family loves me, because they sure as hell don’t keep me around for my cooking and cleaning abilities.

Later on, the casserole DID taste yummy, and as we ate, I felt vindicated.

All was forgotten when that yummy goodness hit my tongue.  At least, until, with twinkling eyes, Uncle Graham reached over and plucked a piece of Mt. St. Helen ash out of my hair.

Did I mention that my family loves me?

I’d always thought of a Hardware store as a man’s domain.  Guy Turf.  Call me sexist.

I’ve been called worse.

You can tell its male-ness by the barely audible primal grunting coming from men as they walk through the door.  You won’t hear that from a woman, unless maybe she is in gastrointestinal distress.  (Mind you, I don’t include Loews or Home Depot in the category of Hardware store.  Any place that sells Martha Stewart brand anything is most emphatically NOT a manly-man hardware store.)

As the wife of a manly man, I don’t have much occasion to go to a Hardware store.  Grocery stores now sell a much wider range of goods; I can get picture hangers and duct tape and sink stoppers at the same time I’m buying milk, eggs and toilet paper.   And if there is a Starbucks in the same store, that doesn’t hurt, either. “Work smarter, not harder,” that’s what I always say.

Ok, I don’t usually say that.  But if I were the woman I wish I was, I would always say that.

So it was unusual for me to find myself in front of Poolesville Hardware store last week.  I needed potting soil; I was already in Poolesville for other reasons; I didn’t want to spend $4.00 per gallon of gasoline to drive down to Lowes; and I was distracted by the pansies they had just put out front on that beautifully sunny spring day.  A Mommy’s version of ‘Oh! Shiney Object!’

I walked in.

It smelled like a hardware store: metal, fertilizers, man-sweat.  There was no question that I was in a man’s domain.

But before I could recoil, I noticed the flower seeds on the right.  And the kitchen gadgets in the aisle in front of me.  And the toy rockets with colorful tails.  Without knowing it, I was pulled in farther, topsoil receding to the back of my mind as I nosed around….

What was in that corner?

Oh Cool!  I didn’t know I could buy that here!

Is that what I think it is?  I haven’t seen one of those in years!

Are those things still legal?

They still make those??

I was catapulted back to my childhood, holding my dad’s hand, asking him what this was for or what that was for and could I please have one of these?

There is rack of penny candy in the center of the room.

All it needed to make it fully Norman Rockwell was a potbelly Wood-burning stove, and a couple of grandpas smoking pipes, playing checkers in the corner with a dog curled up at their feet.

I asked the man behind the counter, who was busier than a tornado in a trailer park, how long Poolesville Hardware Store had been here.

Turns out the guy was the owner, John Speelman.  And he shared that as its present incarnation, the store had been around 25 years. Twenty Five stinkin’ years!  And I’d never stepped foot in the place before!  And I guess the place had been around as a hardware store under different ownership a long time before he took over.

We talked briefly about the sad demise of Selby’s grocery store, and he admitted due to the warm winter, he’d just experienced the worst 8 weeks in retail he’d ever seen.  But doggedly he persists, maintaining a promise to sell only U.S. Made products, and his philosophy of quality versus quantity.

He also shared with me that he is shifting the store to “Going Green”.   That has got to be difficult in a hardware store. I respect the fact that he would even try. Especially in this economy, when he is the witness to many other local stores closing their doors.

I felt three very poignant things:  1) Guilt for never having patronized that place and 2) Surety that I would be back to patronize it in the future, and 3) The urge to give a primal grunt.

But maybe that was just gastrointestinal distress.

Go visit them! Poolesville Hardware Store…even if you don’t need something, they have it there.

We need some new furniture.

Correction, we want some new furniture.  Our hand-me-down couch is sagging worse than my boobs, my rocking chair is thread bare on the arm that constantly has kids climbing up to read stories, and our piano is going to Grandma’s to make more room for us….and room for more chairs, which we really need!

So we took the kids up to Frederick, MD to a furniture store called Wolf’s.  The name should have been enough to put me on my guard.

We walked in, had not a moment to blink, and a salesman was on us.  ON US.

He had pushed himself up from a velour covered chair and limped over to us.

He was 105 years old.

Ah, this place pays their salesmen on commission, I’m guessing.  That, or he’s a really lonely guy.  That, or he’s an incredibly conscientious worker.  That, or he’s creepy as hell.

“Hi folks!  Looking for something?  Has anyone been helping you?”

“Uh….we just looking in general.  Just trying to get some ideas.”

We might as well as said, “Why yes, would you mind following us around the store for an hour, and insert yourself into any conversation we might try to have? That would be lovely, thanks!”

We found My Captain’s favorite chair pretty quickly.  It was the first chair we looked at.  Oh, sure, we spent what seemed like decades looking around at other chairs, but we eventually came back to the first stinkin one we had tried out.

It’s the kind of chair that hugs you when you sit in it.  And it’s got a hidden talent…it reclines.

My Captain, who strives to be the best role model for my Critter that he can, showed him immediately how to properly make use of such a chair.

We bought two.  They will be upholstered in a plain cream color, because evidently I’m on drugs or something and think my kids will never eat in these chairs.

They come in two months.  And then, my friends, then you will REALLY see some blogging.  I can just see myself now.  Comfortably reclined, laptop on knees, sipping a pina colada while my man-servant peels me grapes.

At least, that is how the salesman painted the picture for me……