Not what I expected to be doing on Christmas Eve...

After the movie, we tried to go to this Moroccan place...it no longer exists...and several other restaurants on Hawthorne (all closed). So we decided to head home and pick up a Papa Murphy's pizza on the way home. After we baked the pizza and some gingerbread for my Pumpkin Gingerbread Trifle, Delores and I made some Mocha Meringue Cookies. I've never made Meringue cookies before. We had them all ready, but when we went to put them in the oven, the oven door wouldn't open...that's right, it was locked. Have you ever been locked out of your oven before? Another first for me. We ended up having to pull the oven out (by we I mean Matt) and he messed around with it until it finally unlocked. It had some how gone into the self-cleaning, lock mode. The weird thing about all this was that I had just been wondering how I was going to get everything cooked and ready at the same time for tomorrow's dinner. I mentioned to Matt that maybe we should get a new double oven...could it be fate? Well, will see how it goes tomorrow. We put the cookies in the oven after they had been sitting for awhile and held our breath. meringue is a very delicate thing. Since we had the oven out from the wall I decided to clean back there. There were a few treasures. (I can't believe I took a picture of this)While the meringues were baking for an hour, I was going to assemble the trifle. I pulled the pudding I had made earlier out of the fridge, assuming it had set. It hadn't. so it was basically a bowl of thick milk and I spilled it all over the floor and under the refrigerator so we (Matt again) had to pull the fridge out from the wall to clean that up and Delores ran to the store to get some more pudding. I cleaned out behind a the fridge...again, disgusting but I didn't take any pictures. Delores found some pudding and we assembled the trifle. The cookies were flatter than normal but still very tasty and now I'm ahead of schedule for my spring cleaning. Merry Christmas to me. I'll let you know how the trifle turns out tomorrow.