It’s almost the weekend!

Which for me just means my other job. I’m actually doing double duty tomorrow: 9-1 shift down the mountain, back to Pb to work 3-11(ish). In additional awesome work news, I won’t have a day off work until Christmas which means hella bonus cash for the holidays. With any luck we can buy our new front door before the new year!

Tonight’s dinner-cooking was inspired by my email inbox again. I did a variation on Meatloaf Wellington – made my usual meatloaf (1.5-2.0 lb ground beef, 1 pkg French onion soup mix, 2-3 T of A1, 1 egg, breadcrumbs) and after I cooked it for about 45 minutes, I drained the fat. Then I took a package of crescent rolls and unrolled them, layering them over the top (and slightly overhanging the sides) of the meatloaf and cooked another 15 minutes. It was FANTASTIC and will definitely be added to the regular line up. I didn’t make a gravy and, because I knew I’d be using the crescent rolls, I baked it in a small round casserole dish and angled the beef in away from the sides. It worked really well.

The other day I got an email about a southwest chicken bake using green chilis and tortillas. I sauteed diced chicken with the two shallots leftover from Thanksgiving and 1/4 of a red onion, salt, pepper and some cumin. I took 5 small cans of diced green chilis and put them in a bowl with 1 small jar of salsa, 1 can of kidney beans and about 1/2 c of chopped frozen spinach. Just before combining with the chili mixture, I added the remainder of a package of frozen corn. Stir everything together and then I put a tortilla on the bottom of a round casserole dish, filled it with the chicken mix, topped it with cheddar cheese, then continued layering. I topped it with a tortilla and cheddar cheese. Bake for 1 hour at 350. It made enough that I have dinner for tomorrow and leftovers for the weekend, plus a casserole that I put into the freezer for baking later.

Considering I won’t be home from 8am until almost midnight tomorrow, I’m feeling pretty good about my advanced prep skillz. Now I just have to clean the kitchen before I leave for work in the morning.

The old hard drive remains impervious to my efforts to access files. I’m searching for things which will let me at them but in the meantime the only thing I’m really MISSING is my holiday card list from last year. Damn and blast. I was quite proud of myself for having done that, too. This year I’ll upload it to Google docs and save myself this sort of aggravation in the future.

TV this week has been awesome. The Glee midseason finale was about as close to perfect as you get on television, plus a fantastic closing number. Criminal Minds cranked it up a notch by forcing a leadership decision. Also, the killers who want to pretend to date their victims still creep me out the most. The Mentalist was great tonight and it was nice to see the chemistry returning to normal. The odd insertion of a new Red John team didn’t really ever fit right for me but Jane is funny enough that I didn’t care.

I’m still plugging through East of Eden, though I’ve been distracted by work lately and not making as much progress. I’ll take it to job 1 tomorrow and get some pages in while it’s slow in the afternoon.

Mom is headed to Mexico this weekend. I hope she has a great trip – she deserves it. My next (last?) holiday task is to bundle up cookies and mail them out.