dinner hell

I hate cooking.  I think that if I had a guureat kitchen, professional cooking lessons, a shot of uppers, all the best produce, and the newest funky gadgets from Williams Sanoma THEN I would like to cook...oh, and kids who ate everything...every single bite without complaint or wining...then why wouldn't I want to cook.  But right now I dread it.  My kids eat well.  Either I cook (and act like I like it) or Gavin does, or one of our local restaurants does.  Either way, my kids eat well.  But on the nights that I have some thawed package of chicken breasts staring me in the face and it's already 4:30 PM, I want to scream.

Last night I got take out from Mazza, down the street.  Two orders of chicken potato mutubak.  Served with a salad from home.  Perfect.  The night before Gavin grilled flank steak...wonderful.  So now it is my "turn".  Those damned chicken breasts.  And it would be one thing if it were 9:00 AM and I could slow cook it in some concoction until the sun went down...but I have thirty minutes.  Thirty minutes to pull it together.  I should have gone to the store today.

But right now I hate the store too.  I hate it because I usually go when I am hungry...so I buy things that are worthless to me when it comes to needing to prepare dinner, that is unless I am doing oreo-crusted chicken on a bed of kashi cereal, with a side of greek honey yogurt.  Ahhh.

I keep telling Gavin that if I get my dream kitchen then I will want to cook.  That happens, right?  You have a sweet marble counter top, and the creative culinary juices just start flowing?...I hope.  It is getting a wee bit better with the kids.  They have always been great for breakfasts and lunches...but the dinners could get mind-numbing.  Shelby would dissect her meat until it looked like it was being used to weave in to cloth.  Any thing that was slightly suspicious in color, texture, or shape was an automatic no.  Which meant that cilantro, or parsley, or the most minute speck of onion in any dish could kill it...make it a total no-go...which made me want to strangle her.  Nothing is more insanity-producing than trying to pick the minced onions out of your daughters chicken and potato cheese soup.

But lately it's improved.  Basically I just tell her that if she doesn't eat it she goes to bed right then and there with no dinner.  She tried my bluff once, and it was a hungry, long night.  Since then, she just forces it down.  I know...it's slightly inhumane of me...but I needed to not want to strangle her, so I felt like it was the more humane option of the two.

And Garrett was on a meat fast for a while.  He would say in his new speech, "I....HATE....MEAT" over and over and over.  If I pretended that the meat was a truck and it needed to park in his mouth garage, then I could get a few pieces in successfully.  But it took forever, the pieces had to be microscopic, and doused in ketchup to even go anywhere close to his mouth.  It got to be that I dreaded dinner...more than usual.  By the time it was my turn to eat, I preferred a sedative.  So I got tough with Garrett too.

Oh, and now I am remembering that I have a sitter coming over at 5:30 PM.  Happy day.  I can go grab take out and tell that thawed chicken to hang out for just one more day.