It’s Wednesday! My husband is on call! The sky is grey! I’m having Major Blog Block lately! If you add exclamation points, things sound cheery and more exciting than they are! So let’s have some bullets on the topic of Domestic Mundanity! Woot woot!

* Valentine’s Day was a success. I ended work early (5:30) and locked my husband in the office while I made my Steak Diane. It was not a difficult recipe. Particularly because my copy of The America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook had a “wuss option” and I was able to skip the part where I set the cognac on fire. When I told my husband about it later, he was disappointed. Typical man: fire makes anything cooler.

I made a little side salad and some roasted red potatoes with fresh rosemary and garlic. I set the table with candlesticks and scattered a bunch of chocolate hearts everywhere and poured two glasses of The Princess Syrah. (Which, by the way, was delicious! Go get yourself a bottle.)

Then I turned on the classical music channel, put on a pink dress and heels, and let my husband out of the office. (He wasn’t REALLY locked in there, y’all.)

Then I served him a big ol’ piece of steak slathered in the Diane sauce and sprinkled with chives.

It was delicious. I LOVE sauce. It’s my favorite part of lots of things, including Thai food, Indian food, Italian food, whatever. I love sauce. And this was pretty good, sauce wise. A little sweet from the cognac with a gravy-like consistency. It was a great complement to the potatoes and steak.

(By the way, while I made half the amount of steak, I made the full amount of sauce. Because I love sauce.)

* I’d had to improvise a few times while making the Steak Diane. And let me tell you… I am not what you’d call a “chef.” I mean, I’ve ruined recipes even by following the directions to the letter. So deviating from a recipe seemed like a, well, recipe for disaster.

There were three things I was missing from the original recipe: a meat pounder, a heavy-bottomed pan, and glace de viande.

(In the name of full disclosure, the cookbook offered a full recipe for homemade sauce base. The glace de viande was merely an alternative for people who are lazy on a deadline.)

I looked for glace de viande at the grocery store. But the closest I found was a little plastic dish with coagulated sauce base. (Sounds delicious, right?) (It has a name, by the way, which I’ve forgotten. I found it in the aisle with barbecue sauces and such.) Turns out, you add a little water to it and it turns into a thick sauce. So I just substituted that for the glace de viande, then added wine and water. It turned out very well. Although I suppose I don’t know what I’m missing. Maybe glace de viande would have made us both pass out from flavor pleasure. Who knows.

One of the directions was to pound the steaks into a quarter inch with a meat pounder. Which I do not own. So I covered the steaks in plastic wrap and beat them with a sauce pot. It made a lot of noise, but it worked!

And then, once the steaks had been flipped, the recipe said to weight them down with a heavy-bottomed pan. Which I do not own. So I wrapped another big frying pan in aluminum foil and put an eight pound dumbbell in it. Worked like a charm!

* After dinner, my husband and I watched The Bachelor. Which I think is proof that he was blown away by my Valentine’s surprise.

* In other Matters Domestic, we have been executing Operation Keep Ice Bucket Full quite well. Except for that time that my husband was on call and I kept “forgetting” to refill the ice bucket and then he came home and there was no ice and he looked at me with sad blue eyes fringed by impossibly long lashes and said, “Why is there no ice?” like I had just told him there were no more puppies.

And I had no one to blame but myself! Because not only was the whole “refill the ice bucket every time you get ice” thing MY idea, but I was the one who had forgotten to implement my own idea! Humiliation and shame!

Since that little incident, I have been MUCH more diligent about sticking to the rules.

(Also, I am VERY JEALOUS if you have a fridge that makes ice. Put that on my list of Dream Appliances for My Dream House.)

* As I am sure you are DYING to know, our Great Dishwasher Experiment has ended. We have pretty much resumed our pre-washing before putting things in the dishwasher. I don’t know if we were doing it WRONG, or if our dishwasher isn’t super strong, or what, but we’d end up with a top rack full of dishes that had little flecks of food in them. So we were washing dishes more often, which negates the purpose of NOT pre-washing, I think.

However, I no longer feel like I have to sneak around when I put something covered in butter in the dishwasher. Prior to our little experiment, my husband thought this was dish washing blasphemy. While I maintain that it’s BUTTER and it MELTS and therefore it’s NOT A PROBLEM.

* As is the circle of life, nearly all of the flowers I bought to cheer myself up have died. The carnations were the first to go. And you may not know that the death knell of a carnation is a horrific aroma reminiscent of dirty feet soaked in onion juice.

The daffodil and iris plants I bought (for about $2 each) bloomed wildly for a few days. The daffodil, especially, was bountiful in its cheery yellow blossoms. But then – perhaps because I failed to water them adequately, perhaps because I closed the blinds on them once too often, or perhaps because they’d simply reached the ends of their little flowery lifespans – they stopped blooming and started drooping. So I had to toss both plants in the trash.

All that remain of my flower buying frenzy are four bright yellow flowers that seem particularly impervious to death. The thing is, I have no idea what type of flower they are. And when I Googled “types of yellow flowers,” Google helpfully returned me the image of a dandelion.

Thanks a lot, Google. But I ALREADY know what a freaking dandelion looks like.

* Perhaps you are curious about what happened with the Great Carpet Snow Soak of 2011. Perhaps not. I can’t read your mind. In any case, the carpet dried up.

What’s more difficult to determine is whether my desperate evening snow cleansing maneuver had anything to do with anything.

My husband, for one, was not impressed. When I boasted about how I rid the entire balcony of about ten billion gallons of snow – in the middle of the night, no less! – he pressed his hand on the floor and said, “I don’t think it’s wet… I think it’s just really cold.” And then added, “If American Idol was on while you were doing this, it wasn’t the middle of the night.”

Talk about missing the point. Gah.

* In Fellowship Application news, we are officially in the middle of interview season. We are very fortunate that I am going to be able to accompany my husband on several of his interviews. The first of which will take place this weekend! Lest you think this sounds like a mini vacation, let me lay it out for you: We will leave Friday after work, at 5:30 or 6:00 ish… Drive eight hours… Go to sleep… Wake up early so I can drive my husband to his interview… Then I’ll check out of the hotel… Wander around a strange city by myself… Pick up my husband… And we’ll leave at 2:30 or 3:30, depending on when the interview ends… Drive eight hours back home… Go to sleep.

This is because my husband is on call on Sunday. Poor guy. Then he flies out to another interview on Tuesday… Then, the day he returns from that interview, we will drive to yet another interview. After that I start hyperventilating because it’s TOO MUCH TRAVEL.

* My writing group has been on hiatus for several months, but it is starting up again this week! That means that I now have to come up with both blog topics AND fiction topics. ACK.

Despite the topic-related anxiety, I am really pumped. It’s so awesome to write fiction again and get feedback from writers I admire deeply. Terrifying, yes. But the awesomeness manages to outweigh the fear.

* Since I am having such a hard time coming up with non-boring and non-annoying blog post topics lately, I was wondering if perhaps there was anything YOU wanted to know? I will answer pretty much anything and it would be an excellent alternative to the post I have half written all about my Personal Pre-30^th-Birthday Existential Crisis. Which, come on, no one wants to read that.

And that is all I have for you on this fine Wednesday, Internet. I hope the rest of your day is a good one!