Good food and great family

Today was Thomas' birthday so of course we had him (and his roommate Bobby) over for dinner. Lisa had already come up over the weekend for a surprise visit so she wasn't here for the big day.
I did a total Wonder Woman effort today: did 2 loads of laundry, made and baked a carrot cake for the birthday cake, started a pikes peak roast cooking on the stove in the dutch oven, taught school for 3 hours, had a neighbor kid over playing with Paul, made a deposit at the bank, got ingredients at HEB for the cake icing and sherbet for dessert (half gallon each of lime, orange and pineapple), cooked tamales for 4 (3 pork, 1 chicken and 1 black bean), cooked a 1.88 lb pork tenderloin roast for Joe and me, made orange ginger cream cheese icing for the cake and iced it, sauteed up some more spinach, served and ate dinner and dessert, played several rounds of Uno, put the kids to bed, finished shredding the beef roast and bagged it up into 5 half-pound bags for the freezer, laughed at the dishes in the sink, hung out with my fantastic husband for 2 hours, ate a baby banana and now I'm blogging for the night.
The kids helped out a lot today with the cooking but once Thomas showed up at 5:30 they abandoned me to play outside with him for the next hour until dinner was almost ready. He did need to leave shortly after dinner to finish up a loan application for his new car - I found out about the car and forwarded him the email, Joe checked out the car with him this afternoon and tonight he's buying it - Happy Birthday to Thomas! I told Bobby that since he's also far from his parents that he should expect a tamale dinner complete with cake and ice cream for his birthday in June.

The pikes peak started out weighing about 3 lbs. Since I was going to be cooking it for several hours and then shredding it, I didn't bother searing it first. I put 4 cups of water into the dutch oven with the roast and halved about 8 large cloves of garlic to throw in there. I took one of the big branches of rosemary that trimmed from my bush yesterday and put it in on top of the roast and chopped up one of the spring onions and put it in there too. After about an hour I took out the rosemary and let the roast continue to simmer for about 4 hours total (always covered but with the lid askew for about an hour half way through) - until it could be easily shred using two forks. Like I said, when it came time to package it up for freezing I had 5 1/2 pound packages. Now I'm set for the next time that I need to turn one of my packages of 3 servings of chili into a meal for 5 - I throw in one of the packages of shredded beef and a can of beans and that's it. Oh and I'd throw in some more ayote squash too and maybe serve it on top of rice to help stretch it further. Of course I forgot to take any pictures until I was bagging up the finished product so I didn't bother with that either. That's why I got inspired to do this post.

Well, it's midnight now so I'm going to bed.
Read you in the morning!