Best... Purim... Ever!

Hippo girl is currently eating: Low fat mashed red bliss potatoes

So I woke up blearily 10 minutes before the scheduled start of the Women's Megillah Reading, pulled on a college sweatshirt and a jeanskirt over my pajama pants and decided to call it a "stressed college girl" costume. The reading was excellent, and very very beautiful. I was suprised how many other girls copped my costume idea though.

I went back home and took the bread dough (for my special purim breads, see shabboscooking for more details and pix!) that had been rising in the fridge, punched it down, and let it start rising again while I went out and delivered last night's batch.

Most of the rest of the day was spent making up that batch, (a 10 cup recipe, by the way, and a little hard on the wrists...) shaping, glazing, baking, wrapping, etc. My own eating was curtailed (mostly out of business) to some plain yogurt with honey on top, a hardboiled egg with salt and pepper, some sliced beets with balsamic vinegar; all little tiny portions grabbed on the fly, and a bag of alexia baked fries (oops... but I did share these (sort of...) with my roomie and her fiancee.

After getting the last batch of breads ready to go and putting the finishing touches on my vanilla-vodka-chocolate-cake (really a simple chocolate cake soaked in home-infused vanilla vodka, just split open 2 vanilla beans and soak them in a pint bottle of premium vodka for 3 weeks) I met up with Hippoboy (my lovely and wonderful significant other), who suprised me with a giant chocolate hamentaschen and a bottle of wine, and then a latte when I growled that I hadn't had any coffee yet.

We set off to the festive meal, which was a cooperative food effort, with such varied offerings as steak salad with pesto dressing (v yummy!), spiced carrot muffins, which hippoboy and I dipped into our wine to fulfill the "hayyav inish l'bisumei" aspect of drinking on Purim, roasted cauliflower, etc etc. Of course, I brought my vodka cake and a large edition of my special purim bread.

Hippoboy and I then wandered around delivering a few more mishloah manot, then looked for a mincha minyan, then wandered back to our neighborhood, where we discovered a delightful drink, hard pear cider! I like hard pear cider or hard apple cider very much. It is like moscato but drier and less sickening. Then I decided to make a big pot of mashed potatoes so I could easily put up a shepherds pie tomorrow with some frozen beef/veggie mix that I made from a beef stock setup. Of course, I had to taste a bit (ok, a bowl) to see if they were yummy enough. Hippoboy departed, and now, its time to initiate my sleepysequence.