The Calm Before The Storm

Or is it the eye of the hurricane?

Similar to last week, I was unable to make a ton of progress this weekend because I was distracted. Yesterday we celebrated Mardi Gras! We had seventy two people come to our place. I’ve been doing this for a few years and this year we pretty much nailed it. The food included:

• My seafood gumbo

• A vegetarian friend made a green gumbo

• Another friend made jambalaya (and potato salad)

• We had three different cornbreads

• Someone brought some delicious baguettes

• We had two king cakes, one made by my wife, and one made by the woman who got the baby last year

• One of my friends brought home made moonpies (chocolate flavored and spice flavored, the spice were amazing)

• Some home made guac and hummus

Every year we do this I try to think about what we could do to make it even better next time. There are only a few learnings from this year:

1. Figure out how to make instant pot rice before the night of (it took 45m because reasons)

2. Increase seafood gumbo quantity by 50%

3. Set up a second trash can

Anyway, good times. If you are local to SoCal let me know and maybe I can invite you next year! Pics or it didn’t happen:

Pancakes, king cake, and in progress gumbo

And various videos because for some reason I took almost as many videos as pictures:

(Never forget to deglaze.)

The base, mostly fish stock and roux.

After adding veg and spices.

After adding meat and seafood. I need a bigger stock pot.

A lot of people showed up.

And they all told me they had a good time!

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I did the last few little steps before the final glue up today. These aren’t thrilling bits of progress, but it’s all I could really do for now. I’ll get into why at the end.

First, I put boiled linseed oil on the drawer faces. These are lacewood so I am not painting them. I plan to add soap finish atop the BLO; in my tests it just looked better.