There’s a meme on Facebook about Thanksgiving dinner. I’m sure most of you have seen it. It sums up the holidays pretty much like this: hours to prepare, minutes to eat, and days to clean up afterward.

It’s funny because it’s true.

Which is why I’ve saved the more ambitious of the recipes I want to try for the weekend. This last one I decided to make 2 recipes on the same day.

The first was the cauliflower soup recipe with artichokes and cheese. Simple. Direct. I mean it’s soup, what could go wrong? So I made it. Except I was hungry, which meant time operates by different rules and that five minutes is really half an hour. The soup was delicious. But I also learned something.

A watched pot does boil. It just takes Forever!

The second recipe was braised oxtails. Except the grocery store didn’t have any oxtails but they could order them for next week. But I didn’t want to wait, so I substituted beef ribs. Of course, there was the whole sauce thing to make before I got to braising anything, so I started after eating a delightful bowl of soup (which was around 1 PM). The sauce was complicated and involved boiling off the cup of wine I’d used to deglaze the pan at least twice, making a flour/butter paste and straining the vegetables before using the sauce.

Then there was the vegetables and browning of the ribs before getting them on to simmer for an hour plus. 

This too was delicious and I have some left over for later (and another batch of sauce for another recipe). My daughter is using the broth to cook her Ramen noodles.

But my kitchen was a mess when I was done. In total, the dinner took about 5 hours to cook (the last hour, I watched netflix while the ribs simmered). But it took another 4 hours to clean up. It was the 4 cutting boards, the 5 knives, four stock pots, and countless measuring cups, spoons, and bowls to hold everything. I finally hand-washed the last load of pans at a little after eight, but I’d been washing between simmering/stirring/and reducing.

Now, I’m not sure whether to look forward to or fear the next recipe:D. Ah, but the food. The food made it worth while.

Until next time.