It’s a madhouse out there!
I left work a few minutes early tonight in order to make a beeline to the grocery store for some late-breaking Thanksgiving supplies. I was so smug as I drove to the Harris Teeter, safe in the knowledge I’d gotten there before the after-work crowd! That smugness lasted all the way to the front door. I walked in and was greeted with a phalanx of frenzied shoppers that blanketed the store as far as the eye could see.
Hoo, boy. So much for making it to the store early!
But I was undeterred. I wound my way through the masses with surgical precision, picking up a bunch of celery here, some new dried thyme there, some cream of mushroom soup, the last two cartons of vegetable broth on the store shelf. But all the while, I had my eye on the real prize, the reason I went to the Harris Teeter instead of our local small Safeway: Sister Schubert’s cinnamon rolls.
Oh, I love the Good Sister and her wonderful rolls! They’re a mainstay on our Thanksgiving and Christmas Day breakfast tables, and I couldn’t imagine a holiday without them. But the Sister is popular with so many of my friends and neighbors, and I feared I had waited too late.
So I scanned the freezer section closely. There were her Parker House rolls, right where they should be. And there were some dumplings. And there was some Monkey Bread by some random company.
And there, hiding out all by its lonesome, was one package of Sister Schubert cinnamon rolls.
VICTORY!
I grabbed those rolls quicker than anything and made a beeline for the checkout counter, where I waited in line behind several other Thanksgiving shoppers. But I didn’t care about the weight. I had what I needed to make our Macy’s parade-watching a success from the comfort of our own living room!
One of my very favorite bloggers, Christy from Southern Plate, had the good fortune to spend some time with my beloved Sister Schubert awhile back. And while I didn’t plan it this way, it’s mighty fitting that I tried one of Christy’s recipes for dinner tonight! Indeed, I brought out her egg and pasta bake recipe for the first time, and LeeLee and I are both hooked.
I’ll let you check out the ingredients and step-by-step directions over at her blog, but I will say that this dish was simplicity itself to put together. Even though I did have to take a fly-around with my cream sauce and repeat the process once! As it happens, soy creamer is sweet, even if it says Original. I had thought I was being slick and replacing heavy cream with soy creamer, you see. Don’t be like me. (I used almond milk on the second go-round, because I had it on hand and it wasn’t sweet. Much better outcome, that!)
Once the pasta and cream sauce were mixed together, I nestled four eggs atop the pasta in little divots and baked the whole shebang. The recipe calls for about 15 minutes in the oven, but I was using a much deeper pan – my Le Creuset French oven, in fact – and so it took closer to 25 minutes for the eggs to set. But no matter! We had plenty to do in the interim.
And the meal was worth the wait. The cream sauce was light and airy (and not sweet!) and the eggs punctuated the pasta just perfectly. The angel hair allowed for the cream sauce to bind to more surface area, and the parmesan we sprinkled on top was the perfect finishing touch.
Despite both of us going back for seconds, there’s still plenty of pasta left for our lunches tomorrow! That sure beats the sandwich I was planning on bringing. I’ll take it!
:)