We had our donut party on Sunday.

Every year I think to myself, Self, no one is going to come this year. They’re all tired of this sorry affair. Why would they leave the comfort of their homes to come stand around in your yard and eat a couple donuts? I mean, really.

And then I go and get ready anyway. On the off-chance that someone might show up.

This year we wiped down walls and scrubbed tables and potted plants and mowed and washed the porch and set up tables and ordered cider and apples and filled a shopping cart with a shocking amount of sugar and oil, and people came, of course. I knew they would. But still, it catches me off guard every year.

The party, from our end of the deal, was kind of fraught. Nothing big—no oil burns or food poisoning or salt-instead-of-sugar in the dough—just…off. I felt unfocused, out-of-balance. Kind of sideways weird.

We had decided to start frying early this year so that we wouldn’t have such a mad rush once the party started and so I wouldn’t have to stay behind a pot of hot oil the entire time.

But we cut out the donuts too soon and forgot to take rising time into account so suddenly we had hundreds of donuts simultaneously ready for frying.

Oops.

And then the glaze separated.

My mother—this was her first time to attend the party—took a bite and asked, “Is the milk sour?’

I about lost my head. “Oh my word, Mom, no. Just NO. Do not even suggest such a thing. Are you out of your mind? Do you want to put me over the edge? BECAUSE I AM GOING OVER THE EDGE RIGHT NOW!”

She backpedaled right fast, let me tell you. (And no, the milk was most certainly not sour. Good grief.)

We’re still not sure why the glaze separated. Maybe it was too thin? My husband added a bunch more sugar and that seemed to help a bit.

Another reason for my off feeling: a couple nights before, one of the kids suffered a bout of random and repeated puking. So I was queasy. Or rather, I was worried I might be queasy. Bubbling pots of oil are enough to make a healthy stomach feel twitchy, and after bearing witness to all that retching— well, I felt ill just thinking about the possibility of feeling ill.

And then, an hour before the appointed time, my older daughter got stung by a bee and started up with her big old reactions—huge swelling that lasts for days and lots of pain and tears.
 
To top it all off, the kids were bugging me silly—the youngest in particular. Probably because we were frying donuts two hours before the party was to start and he had nothing better to do.

Right around four o’clock when the party was supposed to start, I had all these sad feelings. The no-one-would-come feeling was front and center, but there were other feelings, too. There was the I-can’t-do-anything-right feeling, and the I’m-not-jiving-with-the-day feeling, and the my-kids-are-hellions feeling, and the I-just-want-to-curl-up-on-the-sofa-and-read-a-book feeling.

But then cars started trickling in the drive.

The trickle soon turned into a downpour. Cars flooded the field. The yard teamed with people.

There were teenagers on the porch, chicken-lovers in the hen house, and sugar-buzzed kids jumping on the trampoline. Some parents took a bunch of kids over to the other side of the house for organized games. One girl, a budding lover of all things English related, came up and recited The Highway Man for me, her mouth full of donut. People gave me hugs.

Still, things were off. I ran out of donuts to fry and panicked because I suddenly realized that I really liked standing behind a pot of hot oil the entire time. And then all the hundreds of donuts somehow got eaten and I panicked because, Oh my word we are running out! This never happened before! Eep! Eep! Eep! Freak out! Freak out!

My husband ran into the house and rolled out the ball of dough seconds—the tough bits of dough leftover from the first cuttings—but he rolled them out super thick and we didn’t have time to rise them so I ended up frying up disgusting balls of half-cooked, burned grossness. And people ate them, ew!

By then, however, I wasn’t feeling so bad about all my “off-ness” feelings. Clearly, people were having fun. How I felt was beside the point.

And then I realized, the reason I felt so sad right before people came was because we were frying the donuts early. See, whenever I’ve fried donuts before, I always had a crowd of people around me. It was a fact, a mathematical equation: frying donuts = a party.

But—and this was my mistake—it wasn’t a party because of the donuts, oh no! It was a party because of the people!
 

I know this, I do. Deep down I know that people only need a welcoming space to be together.

But I still get caught up in the little details, in my angsty self-esteem issues, in my I-want-to-be-the-best mode. The thing is, when it comes down to it, those things really don’t matter one wit.

(Though I doubt many people would come if we just served cold, leftover oatmeal. So maybe the details do matter. Just a little.)

This same time, years previous: the donut party 2011, no special skills (homeschooling rant), apple cake, Italian cream cake, The Stash of 2008

This year for my husband’s birthday present, I made him a bunch of lunches. Because the guy hates packing his lunches in the morning, I thought it’d be real sweet to make him an assortment of food and stick it in the freezer so that on weekdays he could just run down to the basement in the morning, load up his cooler, and go.

Actually, my gift wasn’t all that creative—I did the same thing another year. But I never know what to get him (he refuses to articulate any wishes), so it’s not like I have a ton of options. Besides, he has to eat anyway, and his morning grousing grates on my nerves, so look at me go, killing two birds with one stone, bam-bam.

Coming up with the foods to make ahead and freeze turned out to be a lot harder than I thought it would be. The foods had to be freezer tolerant and tasty at room temperature. Also, he’s lactose intolerant, so no milk, cheese, yogurt, cream, or butter, bummer. Plus, he’s not a huge fan of legumes (crazy man).

The snacks and cookies were easy enough. I mixed up a huge bowl of fruit salad and froze it in pint jars. I made a bulk batch of gorp and two kinds of cookies (one was dairy-free), portioning it all out into little baggies. But the main course stumped me.

I emailed one of my culinary guru friends. She’s a whiz at cooking for people with special needs, so I thought that for sure she’d produce a bunch of viable options. She, however, was equally confounded.

She wrote, “I can’t think of something that would be good after freezing and thawing, eaten at room temperature, and not including legumes or unusual grains or dairy, except for bread, muffins and cookies.  I have hardly ever done freezer meals, except for soup, so I don’t have much experience either.”

It wasn’t just me. This was a tricky situation.

My husband can tolerate a small amount of dairy when eaten with a lactaid pill, so in the end I resorted to cheese. I made pepperoni rolls and hot ham and cheese sandwiches.

The hot sandwiches were kind of a bust. Not only do they use cheese and get cold in the freezer (though they still tasted good when thawed to room temperature), but they use an insane amount of foil. And then my husband went and announced that he’s not exactly partial to the spread I used—a delicious, I thought, mixture of horseradish, dijon mustard, fake butter (that has lactose in it—who knew!), and poppyseeds. Oh well.

I liked my friend’s soup idea, so I got my husband a nice thermos for a birthday present. It’s great, I think (though my husband isn’t jumping up and down with glee), but using it requires a couple extra “cooking” steps in the morning—heating up the soup, warming the thermos, putting the hot soup in the warm thermos…. Simple stuff, yes, but my original goal was to make foods that had zero morning involvement. Just grab and go.

So. This is where I need your help. I’d like to have more ideas for foods I could make ahead and freeze for my husband’s lunches. The birthday is over, but it’ll come again next year.

Am I forgetting something? Do you have any favorite make-ahead lunch foods?

To recap, the requirements:

*lactose free
*freezer tolerant
*tasty at room temp

Please help!

Love,
A Stumped Cook

PS. I also gave him a gift card to Dick’s Sporting Goods store, so not all his gifts were food-related. In case you were worried. (I think he was.)

This same time, years previous: chaos and creativity, another one of those homeschooling rants, puzzling it out, a milestone, three vignettes: my husband, and the fort goes up