Mom's Day and the Great French Toast Debacle.

"A mother is not a person to lean on, but a person to make leaning unnecessary."

First things first: Happy Mother's Day to my mom, one of the greatest and most important people in my life. She's one of my very best friends, and I don't think she realizes how important she is to me. So, I love you mom!

I went home to visit my mom yesterday since Sunday's are reserved for me to mope around and feel sorry for myself in anticipation of the work-week ahead. (Don't Forget: I get more sympathy because my Monday technically starts Sunday night at 11 pm).

Anyway, I wanted to do something nice for my mom becauseshesfantasticandilovehersomuch, but that good deed could not include taking her out to eat.

Why, you might ask? Because she has been doing an amazing job on Weight Watchers and has been exercising and I'm really proud of her. I'm also trying to eat healthfully, and what kind of example are we setting for each other if we chow down just because it's a certain day? If that's an excuse, I'm going to eat a whole cheesecake every Saturday just for the sake of it being Saturday. Makes sense, right? Wrong.

So I came up with the fantastic idea of finding a "lightened up" recipe, and preparing it for her, so at least she wouldn't have to cook.

After consulting Google for a good 3 or 4 days, I finally settled on a recipe for a lighter version of Baked French Toast. Who doesn't like french toast?!

The recipe called for dried apples and raisins. I nixed the raisin idea because I'd rather eat poop, and couldn't find the dried apples, so decided to substitute pecans instead. I thought it was a BRILLIANT idea. Apparently those apples and raisins had something to do with giving the french toast FLAVOR...but that didn't enter my mind.

I got everything ready the night before, so all I would have to do is pop it in the oven when I got to my mom's house. All night I dreamed of how wonderful my french toast recipe that included whole wheat bread, egg whites....and...well, not much else, actually...would taste, and how my mom would declare me BEST COOK IN THE WORLD! (sidenote: I get overly excited about everything. And I mean EVERY.THING.).

Loaded up with a pan of french toast, Boggle, and Yhatzee, I made the hour and a half trip home to hang out with my mom.

The french toast was supposed to bake for 40 minutes covered, then uncovered for another 20 so it could get nice and brown and bubbly and yummy. (Those were my words, not the recipe's).

20 minutes in, I said to my mom, "Shouldn't we be at least smelling the cinnamon baking?" We chalked the lack of aroma up to it being covered, and surely it would smell wonderful during the last 20 minutes.

At the 40 minute-mark, I uncovered it, and ended up baking it for another 30 minutes. As I pulled it out of the oven, I knew it wasn't going to be good. Why?

Because it looked like this:

Being the fanstastic woman that she is, my mom tried to make the best of it, and said it couldn't taste THAT bad. I bravely took the first bite...and it tasted like...whole wheat bread. And egg whites. With nutmeg. BLECH. Declaring it a culinary disaster, I said the mess would NOT be eaten for a Mother's Day Dinner. My mom then breathed a huge sigh of relief because she didn't want any part in it, either. So...I had some left over rice she had in the refrigerator, and mom ate a Lean Cuisine. Happy Mother's Day.

The weird thing was, my mom and I just kept picking at it. Like, it was going to get better after it sat there? It seemed like in principal it SHOULD taste good...but it just never did. Eventually my sister Morgan came home, and we tried to convince her it was yummy, but she too was not impressed. Yet she kept picking, just like the rest of it. My dad declared it "horrible", and he was right.

I also blame this painful burn on that Bastard French Toast, because it happened when I was trying to pull it out of the oven:

My mom thought the whole incident was "Cute". (Cute? Really? It might have been cute if I was say, 14...not 26.)

All in all, it actually was a really great trip home. I got to spend some QT with my mom, which I don't do nearly enough. I also upped her self-esteem a little because I let her kick my ass in Boggle, and once in Yhatzee. I had to let her, it's Mother's Day:)