cobbler breakthroughs

I just wanted to announce that I have had a breakthrough in the whole housewife/homemaker area today.  Or else not so much.

I had toyed with the idea of not making the kiddo take a nap today because it's really getting to be hassle in that he wants to lay there and goof off for an hour before going to sleep. And, well, since I never helped him understand the concept of going to sleep by yourself, I have to lay there and pretend to sleep while he goofs off for an hour. So I was thinking maybe it's time for the nap to go the way of the dinosaurs (at least on some days), but then I decided I wasn't ready to give up my hour and a half or so of selfish mom time, so I laid down with him anyway.  After making special efforts with repeated This Little Piggy-s as well as singing Rip van Winkle from 25 down to 16 years, he actually drifted off in under a half hour. Not bad.

So, then it was selfish mom time and my initial thought was a very familiar one: "I'll get a shower." Because what in the world is better than a quiet house and a shower not interrupted by a 19 month old attempting to break down a baby gate using a shopping cart/ball popper/tractor/big wheel as a battering ram

But this is when the breakthrough happened and I had my very first Betty Crocker-esque homemaker-y moment: "I think I'll get a shower, but first I'll just throw together a cobbler." What, I ask you, is more homemaker-y than a cobbler, after all? And what makes it even more homemaker-y is the fact that I actually thought the phrase, "I'll just throw together..." And furthermore, I let the cobbler encroach upon my selfish mom time.

Now, next question: Why?

Well, I had a can of peaches in my cabinet and, while Paula Deen's recipe called for what I'm thinking were home-canned or maybe even fresh peaches since it said to bring them to a boil with water and sugar before putting them in the cobbler, I was fairly certain that a can of Del Monte sliced peaches in heavy syrup would do the trick without that extra step. Oh, and for those of you who don't habla Espanol, "del monte" means "of the monte."

For another thing, I've found that pregnancy is a time of great justification.  Early on it's like, "I'm pregnant, I'm going to order the medium instead of the small." And then later it's like, "I'm pregnant, I'm going to have a third helping." But then when you get down to the last few weeks and you find yourself regularly thinking things like, "I can't possibly get any bigger," or "Surely I won't get any more stretch marks," but then you realize you can and you have and then you think, "I'm pregnant, and I think I'll just throw together a cobbler."

So, I threw together a cobbler.

I thought the casserole dish looked a little full and I couldn't remember if cobblers had a tendency to expand so I fortunately did have the forethought to put a cookie sheet on the rack below it just in case.  Good thing, too, because if I hadn't then all of what ran over would have ended up on the inside of my oven and not just what ran over the side of the cookie sheet.

The recipe said it should cook 30-45 minutes, so I set it for 30 since my oven tends to cook things faster than the recipe says.  But after 30 minutes, it still was pretty pale looking on top, so I set it for another 10 minutes.  After those 10 minutes it was still somewhat pale in the middle but was starting to look pretty brown around the edges so I thought I'd rather err on the side of caution than end up with a burnt cobbler.  Because a burnt cobbler in addition to having stuff run over and scorch on the inside of my oven was not something my pregnant emotions were prepared to deal with.

So I got it out of the oven and willed myself to let it stand for a while before diving in.  I managed to distract myself for, oh, maybe 2 and a half minutes and then I went to get myself a bowl.  My first thought other than, "This must be what we'll eat in Heaven," was "Is it supposed to be this soupy?" But I figured that it had enough butter in it to solidify at some point, either in the fridge or later in my arteries, so I made the executive decision to forego added oven time.

My next thought as I took the first bite was, "Is the crust supposed to be this chewy?" And then I decided that maybe it was a bad idea to forego the added oven time.  But, in the end, the answer to either "Is it supposed to be this soupy?" or "Is it supposed to be this chewy?" is "Eat it anyway," because it's cobbler and it wouldn't really matter if you were eating the peaches out of the can, drinking the batter out of the bowl, and eating the butter like a popsicle.  Cobbler is good and its goodness covers a multitude of sins.

So maybe I thwarted my own homemaker-y-ness by being pregnant and in a hurry to get that cobbler in my mouth.  And in doing so, I added a new level to pregnancy justification.

I'm pregnant, and I'm going to eat this whether it's done or not.