Travel & Lifestyle Freelance Writer | Market Research Consultant
Tonight, sitting around the dinner table with family back in Illinois, we were discussing the finer points of bad food.
So of course lima beans came up.
Exasperated, my aunt Sally goes, “Yeah! Why do they put those in food?!”
She’s definitely got a point.
Mike and I just hit a low point in our culinary careers when we both decided that we were too lazy to run to the store (which admittedly is across the street) to buy more spaghetti or mostaccioli and opted instead to just break up the lasagna noodles we happened to have into more manageable bits.
Sad.
Mike and I are heading over to some friends’ house for dinner.
“How do we transport the spinach artichoke dip so we don’t look tacky?” Mike asked.
“Babe, we’re going to look tacky. It’s kind of our MO,” I said, remembering that we made the dip two days ago and that the wine we planned to bring costs about $4 a bottle.
“Well, should I just bring it over like it is? Frozen in a yogurt container? Or should I microwave it and put it in our mini-Crockpot?”
Needless to say, we’re nuking it and then toting it over.
Because I have a bunch of work to finish up tonight, Mike, my wonderful husband, is making me dinner.
We’re having Mac ‘N Cheese ‘N Peas, one of my favorite dishes (seriously, no sarcasm).
“How many peas do you want?” he asked.
“Ummm, 167,” I said in true smart-alec form.
“OK,” he replied and began counting.
That’s how much he loves me.
But then he got bored and said, “If you want me to count your peas, you’re not going to get very many peas.”
Understandable.
And I’m pretty sure he loves me a whole lot, just not 167 individual peas worth.
Our kitchen is small.
Small enough that when I pulled a bowl of peas out of the toaster oven and turned around to put them on my plate that I inadvertently ran the bowl into a wall, thus sending little green balls rolling across the kitchen floor.
Sigh.
I put a couple notches on the ol’ cooking belt tonight after making some superb chocolate chip cookies (plump, thick, chocolatey, awesome!) for a good friend and the homeless kids that she helps out.
I took a notch out of my belt when, upon putting the first batch into the oven, I found some wedding leftovers that were burnt to a crisp having (apparently) been in the oven for the past month. Even my scientific-minded husband hasn’t figured out how we didn’t see the dish any of the numerous times we used that appliance.