Friday, March 6, 2009

Crazy Week

Wow. Since my last post things have been kinda nutty over here. I intended to make the Taco Soup on Wednesday, but I realized later that I was short one can of pinto beans and the can of diced tomatoes with green chiles. The tomatoes with green chiles really shocked me too, because I use those all the time to make salsa. I usually have several cans on hand, but with the hubby being out of work, the pantry is not as full as usual. Since I really like green chiles, I didn't want to make the soup without them. Therefore a trip to the store was needed.

Wednesday morning was my first official shift as a server. It went pretty well. Then the manager asked me if I could cover a shift that night. Being the helpful person I am, I said yes. In retrospect I should have said no way in hell no. I had barely two hours from the time I got off until I had to be back. I was in no mood to go to the store during this precious reprieve from work, so I came home and sat down instead. Of course then I didn't want to get back up, but I did. The evening shift did not go as well as the morning. Some really big parties came in and where did they decide to seat them? In my section of course. My first real day as a server and they put a party of 10 in my section. I do not even want to attempt this and ask another server to take them. He just got sat a party of 6 and doesn't want both, so I offer to take the 6 and he agrees. Just when I'm thinking that things are under control, they seat a party of 16 people in my section. Of course I flip out and tell the manager on duty that there is NO way I am ready for that. Mercifully she gets another server to take the 16, but I have to take 2 of her tables in trade. That's cool. I can handle that. Or not. So now I have her two, plus the other guy's one, plus a couple in my own section and that's when things went downhill rapidly. I was so frazzled that I put the wrong table number down on one party's order, so of course their food got delivered to the wrong table. There went that tip. By the time it was over I was so mentally and physically exhausted I just wanted to pass out. Thursday morning I worked again. I came in and found that they had created me a special little 3 table section where no big parties could possibly be seated. Yippee!! The manager that was on Thursday morning was the same one that had been on the night before. She told me that she wanted me to succeed and wanted me to have a section I could handle. Thursday was a good day.

After work Thursday, I finally had time to go to the store and get the missing Taco Soup ingredients. By the time I got home at 4:15 after picking the kids up from school, I didn't exactly have time to start the Taco Soup and have it ready for dinner. And I had to leave at 5 to go pick up my oldest from cheer practice and then go to a PTA meeting at 6. I decided I didn't want to waste gas driving her home and then going right back to the school, so I whipped up some red beans and rice, packed some for us to eat and was out the door again.

Today I finally got everything for Taco Soup in the crock pot. Actually I got everything in but the meat. I left the browning of the meat and depositing it into the crock pot up to the hubby since I was running out of time to take the kids to school. Lately he's been taking them to school most days, but I needed to make fliers for a PTA fundraiser that is next week, so I took them. He did the meat and got it into the crock pot.

I have to say it turned out pretty good. I did add some water since some of the comments on the recipe stated that it wasn't very soup like. I didn't put a packet of ranch in there because it sounded slightly odd and to be honest, I forgot it when I was at the store. Today my mom emailed me a link to this online cookbook because of it's crock pot recipes. Taco Soup was in there too but theirs called for just one can of everything and the one packet each of taco and ranch seasoning so I wondered if it would be under seasoned. I finally decided to try some of the soup even though nobody else seemed to be hungry yet and did think that it could use a little more taco flavor. I just added some more taco seasoning, so we will see if that kicks it up a bit. I also added a drop of ranch dressing to my bowl to see what the ranch would do to the flavor after I had several bites. I was totally cool with dumping half a bowl if I didn't like it, but not so adventurous with the whole batch. I have to say, I liked the flavor that it added and I will certainly put the ranch seasoning in next time.

1 comments:

LenaLoo said...

Hey Lorna! Keep up the good work!