And another one

One of the women working in the kitchen with me joked: "We need to have a nice, fun reception for a change - a bridal shower, a baby shower..." They jokingly looked to my friend Emily, who has a couple late-teen sons. "Not yet!" she responded, "They're not ready yet for that!"

But yeah. We need SOMETHING - a golden anniversary, a baby shower, I don't care what - that isn't a memorial service to make food for. We've buried a lot of people in the past eighteen months.

I worked the lunch (and went to the memorial service) though I didn't feel *great* - I have been teetering on the edge of having a sinus headache all day, and right now it's worse than it's been (I think it's the weather. It's supposed to get horrifically cold by Monday and frankly I am openly hoping we get some winter precip, enough to close campus, just because. I guess I suit up in slacks and a heavy sweater if we're open - my office gets cold when it's cold out, and the heat in that building is not the greatest.

But anyway. Last night I made what I would call scalloped potatoes but I guess is really called "Funeral Potatoes." I kind of cobbled together my own modifications onto the existing recipe:

a 32 ounce bag of the frozen chunked "hash browns." Which, to my dismay, were NOT pre-cooked, so I dumped them in my biggest frypan with some corn oil and cooked them for about 15 minutes (they were still part frozen).

Then I put them in a buttered 9 x 13 pan, dumped 1/3 cup of cut up green onions on top.

And then essayed to make the sauce. The original recipe called for a can of cream-of-chicken soup, plus some cheese, plus some sour cream. But I dislike using cream-of soups because they're generally full of salt (which I need to avoid) and they *usually* have celery (which I pretty much must avoid, unless I want a couple days of hives and indigestion). And usually the lunch for the "cooking ladies" is whatever is left from the family lunch, so I figured I better make something I could tolerate.

So I made white sauce. It's not that hard. I did manage to figure out that it was 2 cups (I had to call my mom and find out if cream of chicken soup, "1 can" meant condensed soup you added water to, or you used it straight.). So I made a medium white sauce, using the guidelines in the "More from Less" cookbook (a Mennonite cookbook I have).

4 T butter
4 T flour - I melted down the butter, added the flour

For flavor, I added maybe 1/2 t poultry seasoning and a little salt (less than the 1 t that the recipe would call for).

After those were combined, I opened a small can (like, 5 2/3 ounces) of evaporated milk. I combined that with enough regular milk to make a cup, then added a cup of chicken stock. Stirred it in to the flour mix and stirred until it thickened. Then I added about 1/2 cup of cheese (I used colby jack, the recipe called for Velveeta, but I wasn't buying a brick of Velveeta just for that). And then took it off the heat and dumped in a pint of sour cream and mixed it up.

Spread the whole mess over the potatoes and refrigerated it overnight. In the morning, I crunched up most of a sleeve of butter crackers ("Town House") and spread them over the top, along with another half-cup of cheese (straight cheddar this time) and dotted it with 2 T butter.

It got baked (down at church) at 350 for about 45 minutes. (The potatoes were already cooked, the sauce had been cooked - it was mainly to make it hot and also melt the cheese).

I was surprised it was actually good (and it all went) given I'd never made it before and it was largely a cobbled-together recipe.

And yeah, I got to eat lunch there - there was lots of ham left (I shouldn't eat it, but....you eat what protein you have access to) and some rice and onion casserole and a bunch of the really good fruit salad another person brought (Just simple - strawberries and pineapple and red grapes - but it was all top-quality fruit so it was good). And some bread.

And then, the rush of cleaning up before the service....I somehow wound up doing the pre-wash of the plates (we have a commercial-grade dishwasher that gets up to a hot temperature, but that's mainly for sterilizing the plates; you have to have them pretty clean before they go in). And making a space for the PEO chapter (the person we were memorializing was a member) to set up the reception they were doing with cookies and other little things for after the service.

The service was well-attended, I guess especially since the woman was older (well, two years older than my mom, and she still has two living sisters). Not a huge amount of family there, but there were us from church and her PEO sisters and people who had been friends of her and her husband.

(Her husband had been a dentist for 40 years here in town - he passed away about a year ago).

I admit that this death - though really more, their decline in health before it - hit me harder than some. I really liked the Wrights. They were nice people, they were helpful and kind. And Mrs. Wright, in particular - her personality reminded me a little bit of my mother's personality, and I think that's why I was especially fond of her. They had some serious health issues in their last few years - advanced melanoma for him (fair-skinned man - of Scots heritage - and lifelong golfer) and Parkinsons and other issues for her.

I took communion to them a few times, as an elder, when they were homebound, and I admit it was kind of hard. (That's one of my less-favorite parts of being an Elder).

I think these are also increasingly hard for me because every one I go to, I have the frisson of knowing that some day, I will be in the "family" for whom the front pews are reserved at a funeral. I will be the adult child struggling to make it through a Scripture reading, or a eulogy, or a prayer. I will be the one returning to a "home church" of sorts for that last time.

I was pretty much okay through the service, though in the benediction at the end, the minister - our minister tends to use these traditional phrases and for some reason, they always get me, maybe it's partly the formality of them or the realization that these have been said for decades and decades before I was born, and, if Christianity persists, probably there will be some saying them for decades after I'm gone. But he said something like "Welcome her into Your arms, a sheep of Your fold, a lamb of Your flock, a sinner of Your redeeming" and that was where I cried a little bit. (Mainly, I think, at the "sheep of Your flock," probably because it also plays on some of my most deeply held desires: to be a part of something, to "belong," for there to be no question at all that I am supposed to be part of that).

Another phrase that does it to me is "may eternal light shine upon (him or her)."

So anyway. That was that. I did go back for the reception, ate a snickerdoodle and what I originally thought was some kind of little deepfried cookie like a zeppole but I was surprised to find they were not little deepfried dough balls, but a mix of coconut and sweetened dried apricots - it was good, it just wasn't what I thought it would be.

And now I have to wash my hair....I haven't really done anything all day other than write my Sunday school lesson and do a little piano practice and the daily Duolingo practice....but I'm tired now and sort of headachy. I think some kind of simple light dinner is in order, not sure what yet. I'd *like* biscuits but am not sure I have the energy to make biscuits.