GRATITUDES:
1. The promise of significant rain (fingers crossed)
2. The prospect of cooking a good meal for my family
3. A completely quiet house (with two teens, this doesn’t happen much)
4. The stones I bought yesterday (ooooooooh, SHINY)

Saturday morning = quiet, slow, lazy morning routines. At some point today I’m going to have to drag both kids out to Target or some such place to get birthday cards for Rory. It’s his birthday tomorrow and I’m once again woefully unprepared. I’ve been trying to get some idea of what he’d like for a birthday meal but it’s like pulling teeth. I have one possible solution that nearly all members of the family might find palatable but with one hardcore vegetarian in the mix and another kid who still eats like a toddler, cooking for the family can be quite a challenge. Personally, I’d like to just slap some steak or chicken legs on the grill and call it good. *Sigh*

Target run accomplished. Yay. Traffic in town was ridiculous so it took easily a half hour to get to the Creekside shopping center, which is about as far on the other side of New Braunfels as you can get before hitting San Marcos. Urgh. Nothing like dragging two moody teens out of their natural habitat against their will for a bit of shopping that has nothing to do with them. Lordy. I’m sure I was this morose and self-centered when I was their age but DAMN, there are days when I want to just sell them on the black market.😑

So, it turned out that our vegetarian kid had to go up to the school for the Theatre group’s end-of-year potluck thing, so I dashed up to HEB and grabbed a nice big sirloin steak, one of the last two USDA Prime cuts they had. (I rarely buy red meat so when I do, I make sure it’s Prime. I don’t go nuts and buy stuff like tenderloin or ribeye – just one sirloin will easily feed three people in our house.) The cut was a fat one so I pan-seared both sides and then popped it into the oven for about 10 minutes to finish it. Oooh, yum… So satisfying with a bit of rice and some French green beans.😍