It seems that I have always been a person subject to whims and occasional flights of fancy. I try to attack life in measured form, to adhere to a schedule and a plan, but my true nature is to lose myself in whatever I am doing, the rest of the world be damned and occasionally this tendency gets the better of me. I may merely be lost in a book, head somewhere lost in the words and imaginary worlds, oblivious to the fact that other people count on me for dinner. I might be lost in the rhythm of writing something, in the throws of some creative activity or out in the yard lost in the labors of paint and planting and building. Or I might even be cleaning, although I am generally not a particularly obsessive housekeeper.
It was the cleaning that got me.
I had such plans. There were merely a few small chores remaining: clean the stove vent, clean under the refrigerator, straighten up the lower shelf in the pantry closet, the one which is at knee height from the floor and which I am least likely to keep in order. Another hour perhaps and I would have the afternoon free to play.
We have these pantry closets that came with the house. They are not that unusual but I hate them. They are too wide and way too deep, about 30 inches front to back, and if you fill them up then you can't find anything. I love to dream about how, in my dream kitchen, I would replace these closets with something more efficient and useable because I really like to be able to see everything. And I have a lot of stuff, although it mostly does get used.
So I pulled out the stool and sat down to clean out that low shelf. There were some bags of partially used nuts rolled up with rubber bands. A few things that were still in bags that needed to be put in the plastic containers I usually store them in (we have had mice in the past, not unusual in the woods, but haven't seen any for a long time). There was a box of almonds that had gone stale. I bought more almonds, and had used them, but never gotten down and disposed of the old ones. Way at the back was jar of almond butter which I had completely forgotten about.
G used to eat almond butter on Rye Wasa as an afternoon snack in the office. We closed the office two years ago. I must have bought this jar before that because it had never been opened. G hasn't eaten a Wasa, or any almond butter, since he retired. So I was sitting there thinking about what I could do with almond butter and wondering if I should just get rid of it, when I decided to Google it.
I found a recipe for a kind of flourless blondie made with almond butter. I realized I had all the ingredients in the house and I decided that I needed to make them. I had to move the stool to the other pantry closet to reach up to the top shelf (about 7 feet up) to get the box of baking chocolate and pull out a bag of semi-sweet morsels. There is a reason that I keep that box out of easy reach. After that, and while the almond brownies were baking I decided that I needed to clean out the pantry closets.
And that was the end of my plans for the day.
Before the brownies were out of the oven I had everything out of the pantry closets and covering every surface in my kitchen, including the floor in places. While the brownies cooled a bit so that I could cut them I washed all the shelves.
The brownie-blondies wee good. We sat and ate a small plate, G reading the papers, me plotting and planning how I would put things back on the shelves and googling a few other things I found lurking in the back corners.
Then I spent the rest of the day, pretty much right up until bedtime, putting everything back. There was some purging and reorganizing a little bit of list-making involved as well. I managed to get dinner made amidst the chaos, and even though G usually does the dinner dishes, I chased him out of the kitchen as there was just too much going on. I think he was rather grateful.
And I did get everything done. Although there were some containers that needed to be washed and repurposed. Some of that had to wait until yesterday morning, after the dishwasher ran. But I am happy with the pantry. And it had been a long time since I had thoroughly cleaned everything out. But of course that is really just an excuse to justify myself. I really just wanted to create a mess and then clean it up. I was in whirlwind mode. And even though it was exhausting I was in my element.
There was also some snacking on brownies to keep my energy up. In fact I know perfectly well that I will be the primary consumer of the brownies, one of the reasons the baking chocolate is way up high, and the rest of the flours and baking supplies, are way down low, on one of those knee-high shelves, so that they are not the easiest things to get at in the kitchen. The only way I can really limit my sweet tooth is to just not make sweet, pastry-like things. If they are there I will eat them.
G is not really all that attracted to baked goods. He enjoyed the brownies. He might eat another one or two, but they would spoil before he finished them. Not that he doesn't have his own snacking weaknesses. The man goes through 4 to 5 pounds of Hershey's nuggets a week, and no, buying better chocolate doesn't work. He eats just as much, or almost as much, but we spend 3 times more, and I am tempted to eat the good chocloate as well. I am really not attracted to Hershey's nuggets.
Of course I get most of the brownies to myself. But hopefully I won't make a habit of that.