Houston Astros vs. Chicago White Sox

There is a local church here with a small billboard-type sign on their front lawn. The sign has letters that can be easily changed and there's something new on their sign every few days. Always something interesting and whoever is making up what goes on the sign has a great sense of humor. This week's sign reads: "God loves both teams, but..... Go Astros!"

Go Astros indeed. Houston is going out of their minds with World Series fever. When the Astros left downtown Houston to head for Chicago, thousands of fans were there to send them off. Most of the fans were throwing white socks at the team buses, the socks ending up in the road so the buses had no other recourse but to drive over them and pound them flat. Coincidence or not?

The first game of the Series is tonight. Our young friend C is coming over with her mom to watch the game, and we're having a potluck dinner. My husband cooked his famous Greek stuffing the other day, being that he got all the ingredients at the supermarket when we went grocery shopping. So there's a big casserole dish of that in the fridge, plus there are hot dogs, and Crescent rolls waiting to be filled and rolled and baked. I also have enough salad ingredients to fill up the largest salad bowl. (Salad? for a World Series? Whatever works... and that works for me.)

I also have a beignet mix from the famous Cafe du Monde in New Orleans. I've been wanting to make those, and I almost made them for the tea party last week, but I had more than enough sweets and sandwiches as it was. My husband doesn't really like beignets, but I do, and so do C and her mom, so tonight's the night for those. (Baseball and beignets? Why not? Maybe the combination will help the Astros win the first game.) I think instead of making the beignets in a square-shape, as they do at Cafe du Monde, I will make them in baseball-shaped rounds. Baseball Beignets. Sort of has a nice ring to it, don't you think?

Since my young 14-yr-old C is saving all the placecards I make, and she expects to find them every time she comes here, I made up World Series placecards for each of us. I used cut-outs from the Houston Chronicle..... pictures of players, small headlines, the Astros' logo. The best things I found in the Chronicle couldn't be cut out, because I'm sending the main section and the special baseball section up to my sister's husband. He's the biggest Astros fan, and he's thrilled to finally see them in a World Series. I told him I'd mail him all the Astros parts of the Chronicle until the World Series is over, so I can't be cutting up those sections of the paper.

I showed my husband the baseball placecards, and he looked at me as if I'd lost my mind. "We're eating in the TV room tonight, not the dining room."

Oh. I didn't think of that.

Well, the placecards came out very well, and they will look just as Astrospecial in the TV room as they would have in the dining room.