Herb Tablescape & Cat in The Refer

HERBS

I have used the same centerpiece that I placed

on Centerpiece Wednesday cause I ran short on

time. Today a precious lady in our church came

by with her clippers and shovel and gloves to

inform me she was going to help me weed. How

sweet is that? She helped so much and it was so

greatly appreciated. My husband and I decided we needed to go to our Daughter-in-laws and help her with her yard, so it is now almost 10:00 p.m. and time for a little respite. Hope to do better next week.

I just can't live without my herbs. They give a simple meal a burst of flavor.

This is a pretty simple tablescape but I am pretty simple

myself I love all kinds of bread with fresh veggies and herbs, maybe a little

olive oil and sea salt too. And don't forget the cheese.

I found this little cheese keeper at
where else.....TJ Maxx

I'm sad that it is too cold for my basil to be doing it's thing yet.

That would be the crowning glory for my herb basket.

There is a wonderful store in St George...

Urban Renewal , and that is where I found

this wonderful tray or basket. They

always seem to have just what I am looking for.

CAT IN THE REFRIGERATOR


I finally found out that the cat in the refrigerator was alive and that there was no product in the refrigerator at the time. But so what, who wants to buy anything from someone who keeps a cat in the area of food? My husband was right, we could no longer buy from this wonderful Chocolatier. And now the fun would begin.


Did I say fun? Let me tell you this was the most stressful, well almost the most stressful time in my life. As I mentioned before we had to produce about 5,000 golfball truffles for the "Dinah Shore Open" in less than two weeks and we had no commercial kitchen to work in and no experience in making truffles. What to do?



First we had to obtain an aproved kitchen, find a supplier of fine chocolate and figure out how to mold 10,000 golfballl halves. You see you have to make two seperate pieces, fill them with ganache and close them to look like a golfball....no seams.


We found the kitchen HOORAY! We found the chocolate suplier, YEAH! and now we had to learn how to temper the white chocolate quickly. STRESS PERSONIFIED!


We assumed, being the novice chocolatiers that we were, that our former supplier of truffles used fine white chocolate that had to be tempered. Well he didn't and we did.


The first batch, because the room temperature was all wrong and we had tempered the chocolate incorrectly stuck to the molds, oh yes, (we had to find molds also). When the chocolate is not tempered it can cause one or all to lose their tempers. We had to beat the chocolate out of the molds. We had to contain ourselves to not beat one another during this trial.

And then we started all over again molding the chocolate.

By the third day we had figured it out. It was now about 3 days before delivery time and we only had about 2,000 truffles to go.


By the end of the third day, day? it was way late at night, maybe

it was early day, 4:00 a.m. I literally crawled out of the kitchen

into the van. I am not kidding, I crawled. We had been working

about 18 hours a day, standing on our feet the whole time. Not

only did we have to make the truffles but we had to clean up

the place after we finished. But we had accomplished our goal,

5,000 beautiful golfball truffles and no seams.


We could hardly wait to hear from our client. We knew he would be thrilled. Guess what? You don't always get what you anticipate.

Next week: The clients fury!

I am participating in Tablescape Thursday