Done, Done and Done!!!

With eleven minutes remaining on the clock, I am done! With my wonderful wife's assistance, I submitted an entry apiece to all three categories of the Chocolate Adventure Recipe Contest. The recipes are...

(Savory Category) Pan-Pacific Duck with Easy Mole Sauce, Tortillas and Grilled Scallions - Mexican Mole meets Peking Duck.
(Sweet Category) The Ifrit's Sweet Embers - slightly spicy chocolate candies filled with nuts and dried fruit.
(Beverage Category) Cocoa d'Annam - cocoa with a bit of a Vietnamese flavor.

There were bumps in the road - like discovering in the final half hour that the word count for the duck recipe cooking instructions were 50% too long. The laptop suddenly starting to act strange. I think settings changed, but there wasn't time to pursue it...only to switch to the desktop. Being so tired I can barely type or think.

And then there was our (autistic) son, who was helping his mother remove the offal from the bird's cavity, grabbed the neck and thought it was...the duck's penis. He promptly flung it across the room, where the dogs began to fight over it. He's shrieking his violation to the world. Meanwhile, the cats are trying to climb my wife's legs to get at the duck. Then the liver slithered out. Our son, believing that the liver is really a placenta, is sure that we killed a pregnant hermaphroditic duck and begans to loudly gag and threaten to report us to the SPCA. The dogs are still fighting and the cats are growling. And my wife has rendered duck slime (fat) all over her hands.

Nor was our son happy to see that there were still a few tiny feathers on the carcass. He fled the room babbling about "it was a white he-she..." and poured bleach all over his hands. My wife is trying to scrub her hands clean so she can clean his burning hands. She's thrown open the windows and the snow is trying to blow in.

I have been informed that ALL (in the unlikely event of) future duck preparations are strictly my own. Love only goes so far...

It did taste good.

I was the only one who'd eat white pregnant he-she duck...

I did hear good things about my cocoa last night.