December Daily {:2:} Recipes, Countertops, & Quilt Sign-ups

I am a creature of habit.  I love for my Mondays to look exactly the same every single week: Clean the house (I like to do it on Mondays so I start the week off right), go grocery shopping for the week, and prepare for my various classes and other tasks for the week.  Today, however, was a slightly different Monday, because my boss gave our team a few days off for Thanksgiving.  So I slept in (again), sleeping off the several late nights of football and talking with family and friends.

Then I spent about an hour or so looking through cookbooks and websites trying to decide on what recipe to teach to my students in the baking class tomorrow.  Whenever I look for a recipe, I have to look for the following three things:

1. All the ingredients are 'halal,' which means permissible  or acceptable in Arabic.  So, no bacon or alcohol.
2. All the ingredients are available in France.  It doesn't seem to fair to teach them how to make something that they can't replicate at home themselves.  So I keep my pumpkin spice m&m's from the US for me, you know...to be fair to the students.  :)
3. The recipe is easy, and can be done, start to finish, in two hours.  

Once I had my recipe picked out, I made my grocery list, gathered my things for my quilting class and head out the door for the Center.  (I volunteer at two different community centers in the city, and am at one of the two every day of the workweek.)  A little over a month ago, when the Directors of the Center were coming up with the schedule for the various classes, I spoke with the one woman who was signed up for my quilting class.  Because of her work schedule, she requested that the class be in the evening, so I scheduled it to be on Mondays from 4-6pm.  (I have a second class on Friday afternoons for women with school age children that is earlier in the day.)

That woman has yet to show up for my quilting class.  So every Monday for the past month, I've gone to the center and waited faithfully between 4-6pm.  Other women have expressed interest, and so I kept hoping and praying someone would show up, but no one ever came.  Last week, right as I was packing up everything to leave, a woman knocked on the door of the Center.  She assured me that she would take the class and show up on time this week.

So I went again, faithfully, today, wondering if I would once again sit alone, quilting, in the cold building waiting for someone to join me.  When I entered the Center, I was thrilled to see that the countertops for the kitchen had been delivered!  (I spent most of the month of October helping to pick out that countertop, the cabinets underneath, the color of paint on the wall, and other decorations for the Center.)  It still has some work to go, but pretty soon we're going to have a functioning kitchen for me to use for my baking classes!

A few minutes after 4pm, the woman from last week showed up...and right behind her, two other new women!  The two new ones had never been to our center and wanted to hear what kinds of activities would be offered.  They signed up for my quilting class on the spot!  After talking with all three women, we decided to change the time of the class to earlier in the afternoon.  Here they are filling out their inscriptions for the class.

The two new women couldn't stay for the class today, since they hadn't planned on being there for two hours.  *Fran* (not her real name), however, did stay.  She picked out fabrics and happily got started on making a Grandma's Garden square.  It was sweet to watch her work...she's quite the perfectionist!

After the quilting class, I headed over to the grocery store to purchase the items necessary for tomorrow's baking class.  I had a slightly embarrassing expat moment in the checkout line.  Normally, I get in the normal checkout line with a cashier, because I have so much stuff.  But tonight, I only had a few items, and since there was no line at all at the self checkouts, I headed over there.  Problem was, I needed two separate receipts: one for the items for the class tomorrow, and one for my personal items.  So I rang up half of my things first, paid, and then started on the second half.  But the machine got confused from the amount of items on the scale (from my first purchase), and the cashier had to come over to help me.  Then I spilled all my coins all over the ground and confused the cashier further as she thought the machine was spitting coins onto the ground.  I told her no, it was just me, being more complicated than necessary.  I at least got a smile out of her for that.

Most of the Christmas cookie recipes I found required the dough to be refrigerated for at least two hours before being sliced and baked...which would eliminate the recipe from my requirements.  But I decided that I could make the dough ahead of time tonight, and put it in the fridge.  Then tomorrow, the women could make their own dough, slice and bake mine that I'd prepared ahead of time, and then take their dough home to bake at their own will.  So...I whipped together some Martha Stewart Cranberry Noels (with almonds instead of pecans, because remember...they have to be able to get the ingredients here).

Now, while I wait for some laundry to finish washing, I'll translate the recipe and get everything ready for tomorrow.  Then, Advent devotional, and off to bed.  This whole stay-up-late/sleep-late thing of Thanksgiving weekend comes to an end today, and it's back to real life.  I'll go to bed thankful that I didn't give up on the quilting class after all those Mondays of being faithful to show up at the Center.  Perseverance pays off.