Hello, friends!!! I’ve missed you and I’ve missed the blog world so much. As you might have guessed from my absence, we lost power when Irene rolled in and just got it back last night. Of course, being the loyal blogger that I am, I took pictures throughout so that I could update you guys with how the whole thing went down. And then after storytime I’d like to show you this:

But story first. SO. We spent much of Friday and Saturday scrambling around looking for supplies and watching the news non-stop, which was making it seem like the apocalypse was coming in hurricane form. People were going crazy getting ready for the storm and we had a hard time finding stuff like water and batteries. But by Saturday we decided we were done with the preparations and that we would just hunker down and wait for the storm. Anticipating loss of power, I quickly cooked every expensive perishable item I could find. This resulted in a huge baking session where I attempted to use up all of our butter, eggs, and ricotta cheese.

I made lemon ricotta pound cake, chocolate oatmeal cookies, and chewy chocolate chip oatmeal cookies. I think I was partly baking so much just because I was nervous, but at least I managed to keep our stuff from going to waste.  In the early afternoon, several hours before the eye of the storm passed over us, the rain started to come down and our backyard started to flood.

And our house started leaking by the screen door in back.

At first I was freaking out because the storm hadn’t even really arrived yet and things already didn’t look so good. But the leaking eventually stopped and for several hours it was just regular thunderstorm type weather. At that point we were thinking that the media just hyped the whole thing up and that nothing that bad was going to happen. Then 8pm rolled around, the wind picked up, and our power went out.

After lighting some candles and getting our flashlights, we went ahead and set up camp in the kitchen. Our master bedroom is on the top floor and is surrounded by windows, so it did not seem like the safest place to be. The kitchen is the most interior room and it has no windows so that’s where we slept.

And by “slept” I mean Jason slept and I spent a good 5 hours squeezing his arm to death, praying, and listening to the crazy wind and sheets of rain outside. I’ve been through many a tornado season in Georgia so I’m quite familiar with high winds, but this to me was more frightening. Mostly because it lasted so LONG and the wind was relentless so I was terrified a tree was going to come down and kill us all. After about 4am the winds calmed down and I was able to fall asleep. When we woke up in the morning we found that a tree had fallen right on our next door neighbor’s house, taking out a part of their roof and landing on the AC units right between our houses. (I would show you a pic but I didn’t think the neighbors would appreciate me taking a photo of their house and posting in on the internet) Thank goodness no one was hurt. I am SO grateful because that tree (or many others) could have easily fallen on our house.

When we woke up in the morning, still with no power, we quickly started dying of boredom. So we headed out to Target to purchase some entertainment. Target was operating on generators so they were still open, just not on full capacity. The board game section was cleaned out–lots of people had the same idea we did apparently! We settled on only the best board game ever invented.

Monopoly turned out to be our saving grace. We would have gone crazy without it. We played it by sunlight and we played it by candlelight.

Our meals were a little dicey since we had no way to heat food and we definitely did a lot of snacking and eating things like this:

We also had a few coolers full of things like salad greens, milk, and condiments that we were keeping fresh on ice.

And we may have relied on eating out a couple times.

By yesterday we were seriously suffering from boredom (you can only play so much Monopoly) so we went out to see The Help last night. I have mixed feelings about “the film that everyone is talking about”, and most of them are negative. In fact, I could probably write a book about all the reasons why I didn’t like the film and I could definitely write a whole blog post about it. But I won’t. At least not right now. I know this is my space so I can say whatever I want, but I really just don’t feel like it. So you’ll just have to stick with all the rave reviews that people give it (and there are many, trust me, I’ve seen a dozen in the food blog community alone) and decide for yourself. If anyone is curious (which you probably aren’t), I would be more than happy to expand on my thoughts in another post. ANYWAYS, back to Irene. So when we returned from the movie, our power was back on! Hooray! I really can’t complain because we weren’t hurt and many people here in Virginia still don’t have power, so we got lucky. I got lucky again today when I found these babies BOGO at the grocery store:

Bee tee dubs, If you actually read all of what I just wrote, THANK YOU! You are awesome. And here is your prize, albeit meager.

I used the leftover lemon ricotta cake to whip up a simple yet delightful before-dinner treat for Jas and I tonight. Yes, dessert before dinner. That’s how I roll, and that’s how I plan to roll for a long long time.

Ideally I would have used greek yogurt or just real whipped cream in this treat, but Irene helped some very old “whipped topping” in our freezer to thaw out so I used it for the sake of not wasting it. And it. was. delicious.

Strawberry-Banana Trifle for Two

• 2 cups sliced fresh strawberries
• 1 medium banana, thinly sliced
• 1/3 c. whipped cream or whipped topping
• pound cake or angel food cake, thinly sliced
• 1 t. sugar

-Sprinkle the sugar over the strawberries and stir to coat. Let the strawberries sit in the sugar in the refrigerator for about 10 minutes to release their juices and get nice and soft.

-In a bowl or glass, assemble the trifle in the following order: cake, fruit, cream, cake, fruit, cream. Chill for at least 15 minutes to allow the flavors to come together. Serve cold or at room temperature and enjoy! Makes 2 large dessert servings.

This couldn’t be easier to whip up and you can adjust to have as much or as little of each ingredient as you like and use whatever fruit is seasonal. The lemon flavor in the pound cake balanced perfectly with the tartness of the berries, the sweetness of the banana, and the rich cream.

I’m never throwing out old cake again! I love it when food can be re-purposed for new things.

I’m off to do some SERIOUS catching up on homework. Classes were cancelled today and yesterday, but they’re back on for tomorrow so it’s back to the grind for us. Plus I still haven’t made dinner!

Thanks for reading!

-Lauren