Our "Wright"-ing Pad: 31 days... of dinner chez les Wrightlings... DOUGHNUT Saturday! {day 13}

13 October 2013

31 days... of dinner chez les Wrightlings... DOUGHNUT Saturday! {day 13}

Okay... so we didn't ACTUALLY do DOUGHNUTS for DINNER.

It was breakfast.

But since breakfast would certainly be the more interesting meal for that day (we'd be on the road again that night) and since it is our blog and since we do have some author/creator liberty here, this "meal" ain't "dinner."

And it does count for today's 31 day post.

Additionally? That's not to say we've never done doughnuts for dinner. In fact, my kids would lobby heavily to do so. We've also been known to dunk oreos into cold milk and call that good for an evening meal.

But I digress.

In honor of Brendan's presence with this weekend and to fulfill a promise made long ago (like years), we had homemade doughnuts for breakfast and invited friends.

After our last home assignment and we headed back to Niamey, I learned how to make doughnuts... which developed into a last Saturday morning of the month tradition for our family... and we then expanded to including different friends and visitors whenever we could. This tradition usually involves me getting up in during the wee hours of a Saturday morning (not a sacrifice... it is alone time that I LOVE!) to have several dozen doughnuts ready near 9 or 9:30ish. Sometimes it is just one basic type of doughnut. Other times I pick out several recipes to follow. Sometimes I get super creative and start inventing totally new to us doughnuts. Sadly, those are rarely repeatable... since I forget or don't have time to write them down in the moment.

For what it is worth - after my third "time to make the doughnuts" morning Stateside, I'm discovering that I make better yeast doughnuts when in West Africa. Cake doughnuts, on the other hand, are turning out better on the west side of the Atlantic..

We did have a couple of other visitors stop by - but they were on their way, diving into their busy Saturdays, before I got my camera out and started snapping photos... or assigning a child to take a few... but I was super happy to see Cousins Mike and Laura pull in the driveway.

As our friends started arriving, Brendan was busy helping me in the kitchen. I believe he was sweeping. Either he almost panicked, saying "I haven't brushed my teeth... I gotta run and take care of that!" or he saw a way outta work.

It didn't matter, however, when his sis immediately retorted, "Why are you worried about that before you eat doughnuts? Planning to kiss someone?" His ears turned red (our friends, both families, have only and all girls...) and he kept right on sweeping.

Probably the smart choice considering how outnumbered he was at the moment!

Chocolate Cream Filled Vanilla Sugar Doughnuts

Pumpkin Spice Doughnuts with Buttermilk Glaze
~my faves... this time around... although the chocolate cream filled were a close second~

Krispy Kreme (baking sheet in back)
Grapefruit Donuts (front left - pink icing)
Old Fashioned Sour Cream Donuts (front right)

I ran out of glaze... so used up the rest of the vanilla sugar for several doughnuts, too.
And don't forget the doughnut holes!

Our conversation over the course of the morning touched on many different topics - a sacred music concert led to Irish step dancing which morphed into to hula hooping and belly dancing... and it just got stranger - and the laughter louder - from that point on. Squirrel soup and guys who love to hunt, the pointlessness of shoes, germ-a-phobia and how the hot tub at Great Wolf Lodge was just nasty... or was it?, side by side texting conversations, curly hair and perms... or not, drama and exaggeration, third world toilets - or lack thereof - and how both Rebekah and Nadia have grown up thinking the painted warnings in Niger reminding men not to aim at the walls when they used the bathroom were because urine would somehow cause the walls to crumble. That might have been the moment Tim decided we needed to discuss baseball instead.

We laughed at little kids playing hide and seek - where we spent a lot more time "seeing" the hiders and very little time seeing or hearing the "seeker." And I'm pretty sure parents stopped counting how many doughnuts some of the munchkin crew consumed. I was definitely thankful for cider, orange juice, chocolate milk and additional cinnamon rolls that our friends contributed.

We also talked Olympic wrestling - but actually ended up observing real life wrestling as several of those kids started playing king of the couch.