Fed Up
What is with everyone needing dinner every single goddamned night? My god, it's relentless! How have we not come up with a better way to address this yet? I've heard that there are actually women who can produce a colourful, balanced, palatable meal that doesn't include day-glo orange cheese or twinkies night after night AND do all the other stuff that goes into having something resembling a life. Since school started, I've been concentrating on making dinner. Yesterday I looked up and realized that I had done nothing but cook dinner for roughly seventeen days. I don't think I can live like this.
So I've been experimenting with cooking in bulk. You know, where you cook big batches of stuff or cook more than one thing at once? Conventional wisdom has it that you freeze the excess for easy consumption later on, but that would entail emptying out the three half-empty cartons of ice cream and forty-seven leftover freezies, plus the frozen peas we use whenever someone hurts themselves, so instead I'm making everyone eat three dinners on Tuesday and not feeding them again until Friday. I'll let you know how it goes.
We had our sort-of-bi-monthly dinner party that we do with four other couples last Saturday. My friend Janet did the main course. My friends Janet and Collette are neck in neck for brutal, no-holds-barred competitiveness. Janet also has this enduring, endearing ability to say things just a little bit wrong, which I love. We were at Janet's sister's house and we played this game that her sister Susanne likes, where everyone writes down the names of as many famous people they can think of and puts them in a hat, then you split into teams and one person on the team has to pull names and yell out clues to makes their team guess as many names as possible in a minute. You can imagine how quickly this degenerates into a meleé of name-calling and obscene gestures, particularly when the group is fairly evenly split between literary nerds and physicists ("Frequency conversion guy" "What the..." "Hertz!" "Guy who wrote the Count of Monte Cristo!" "Oh fuck off"). Plus there's this weird phenomenon whereby, no matter what, some obscure person like the third baseman for the 1934 Yankees will show up multiple times. So for the magic moment of the night, it's kind of a tie between Janet pulling a name, saying 'he's a singer' and then glaring demandingly at her team for the next seventeen seconds, and the fact that she kept calling her incomparable veal osso bucco 'osco bosco'.
I love my friends.
So I've been experimenting with cooking in bulk. You know, where you cook big batches of stuff or cook more than one thing at once? Conventional wisdom has it that you freeze the excess for easy consumption later on, but that would entail emptying out the three half-empty cartons of ice cream and forty-seven leftover freezies, plus the frozen peas we use whenever someone hurts themselves, so instead I'm making everyone eat three dinners on Tuesday and not feeding them again until Friday. I'll let you know how it goes.
We had our sort-of-bi-monthly dinner party that we do with four other couples last Saturday. My friend Janet did the main course. My friends Janet and Collette are neck in neck for brutal, no-holds-barred competitiveness. Janet also has this enduring, endearing ability to say things just a little bit wrong, which I love. We were at Janet's sister's house and we played this game that her sister Susanne likes, where everyone writes down the names of as many famous people they can think of and puts them in a hat, then you split into teams and one person on the team has to pull names and yell out clues to makes their team guess as many names as possible in a minute. You can imagine how quickly this degenerates into a meleé of name-calling and obscene gestures, particularly when the group is fairly evenly split between literary nerds and physicists ("Frequency conversion guy" "What the..." "Hertz!" "Guy who wrote the Count of Monte Cristo!" "Oh fuck off"). Plus there's this weird phenomenon whereby, no matter what, some obscure person like the third baseman for the 1934 Yankees will show up multiple times. So for the magic moment of the night, it's kind of a tie between Janet pulling a name, saying 'he's a singer' and then glaring demandingly at her team for the next seventeen seconds, and the fact that she kept calling her incomparable veal osso bucco 'osco bosco'.
I love my friends.
Comments
I cook every night because a) everyone would die of starvation otherwise and b) I don't have it together enough to bulk cook. We do a fresh meal, then leftovers, then a fresh meal, then leftovers, then dinner out/takeaway, then crapshoot, then start over. I also swear by soups!
Oh--and I would totally love that famous person guessing game. Sounds like fun.
and a note to mary lynn: woman! if you are doing all the cooking, ed has to do the cleaning. that's the rules at our place. if you want to eat, you clean. works well.
Sometimes I wonder why I even try because my kids are so picky.
The other day I made homemade chicken soup, took the time to puree the veggies and added their favourite noodles. All they did was bitch and complain. Then I called them shitheads and they started to cry.
Another memorable moment in my life as an imposter-mommy.
Your friends sound fun to me. I love Dumas and trying to comprehend string theory. But I don't know anything about baseball: )
However, felt compelled to suggest getting a crockpot! I'm just getting into it now, but 2 of my sisters live by them. Usually the recipe is something like "Put these ingredients into crockpot. Turn on crockpot. Come back 8 hours later." So easier, and it makes enough for the whole family.
I hear your pain sista! I spend more time trying to figure out what to feed my family...and what everyone will eat because nobody likes what the other does, and then hubby comes home and is all like, "Tacos again?" Taco up your...
Well, we need a revolution I think.