I woke up this morning and wanted sausage kolaches. Like, two kolaches. This is because you other homesick Texans have been sending me email about food I’ve forgotten about, and Lis sent the link to the Homesick Texan’s kolache recipe.

I don’t live in Texas, so I can’t just run to the donut shop, and you can’t make just two kolaches, so… I decided to make kolaches for the writers’ room.

But I’ve never made kolaches before, and I worried that they wouldn’t turn out to be edible, so when I went to the store to pick up mini-sausages, I also grabbed two rolls of pillsbury crescent rolls so I had the cheater’s version.

And then, to dress those up, i threw some brie in some and parmesan in some others and suddenly I’ve got dough rising and cresent rolls baking and it takes hours and I’m almost late for work. Worse, there’s no great way to transport kolaches, because I want to carry them in a paper bag to keep them crisp, but all I’ve got is an (unused) Albertson’s bag, but I know that some of the germ-phobes (so many writers are crazy OCD germ-phobes, it’s ridiculous), if they saw me carrying their food in a paper grocery bag (even though it had never been used), they’d freak out and call me disgusting and never touch these homemade things. So I wrapped some of the rolls in aluminum foil and some (the ones from scratch) I snuck in the paper bag so I wouldn’t risk ruining them in case they actually turned out to be decent. (Shhhh.)

Walking to my car with a bag of kolaches gave me such a flashback to high school, on my way to an early-morning rehearsal or study session with the unhealthy promise of belly-bombing pigs-in-blankets and a cup of hot coffee.

I rolled into work and quickly removed all trace of paper bag, but: the ones in the aluminum foil had lost all crispiness, and looked sad. The ones from scratch ended up looking the best, but I think they were too doughy.

AND I forgot one of the writers doesn’t eat red meat, and I had stuffed a sausage in every single one. AND one of our Texan writers, the one from Austin, is out working on her outline today, so I didn’t get the benefit of someone backing up this ridiculous impulse.

But: out of three dozen kolaches, there’s less than a dozen left, so I suppose my crazy-baking impulse was somewhat of a success.

It’s even stranger when I tell you that originally I was supposed to make chili for the room (true), but it turned into this.