Let them eat toast

March 5, 2013 By

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I’m always annoyed when the host of a cooking show tastes her food at the end of the episode, rolling her eyes back in ecstasy.  Not only does she magically create beef rolls, arugula salad, and a pear tart in under twenty minutes, but then she brags on herself.  “Oh my gosh,” she says into the camera.  “This is so good.  Seriously.”  Her hair is all blown out and she wears a size two but she takes a glorious bite of something with a face full of Chanel make-up.  Honestly, it does look amazing, and if she says it’s the best pizza ever it must be.  But I am at home at 4 pm staring into my refrigerator, wearing sweatpants and my daughter’s vanilla cupcake lip smackers with not a stitch of real adult make-up on.  I glance back at the television and see this beautiful person still standing, doing all kinds of lovely dicing and chopping, and I watch in a trance as her curls are still in place.  The cabinets are white and all the dishes are white and she never seems to run out of spoons.

But meanwhile, back in real life, dinner happens.  While I desire to produce homemade chicken stock on a Tuesday afternoon, or make stuffed peppers with a side of beet salad, serving it to grateful children who ask for a double helping of roasted squash, I end up making scrambled eggs with cheese. The little song I made up about it being breakfast for dinner! (it comes with a dance) is so overused and nobody likes wheat toast anyway.  So it’s milk with no chocolate, eggs before ice cream, and please sit down at the table because we aren’t wild animals eating our kill.  Which ends up in a rendition of accurate wolf howling and a discussion of how much we all hate eggs and me bemoaning the fact that I could only find two spoons.  My daughter shrugs like she is completely unaware that there is Lenox silverware hidden in the garden being used as tiny shovels for the dirt-fairy nymphs.

Where is my make-up artist? Where is my blow-out? Why are my children so resistant to toast, I’d just like to know?

One of these days, someone will create a real cooking show, where the chef runs out of time and keeps getting interrupted by a toddler trying to climb the cabinets to get into the shelf for old Valentine’s Candy.  You’ll see her start to sweat because she’s embarrassed about her child’s behavior and ends up using baking soda instead of cornstarch or throws in way too much salt.  Then at the end of the show, when she can’t quite make it to the pear tart because her son keeps trying to grab power bars from the pantry to curb his imminent starvation, she tries to cover for herself and says that you can just eat a whole piece of fruit for dessert like she planned it all along.  But no one believes her because come on.  No one wants a stupid pear.

At the end, she’s supposed to taste what she made. While she’s lifting the spoon to her mouth she slips on the dog’s water (who sloshed it all over the tile? I swear) and her daughter walks in and grabs a bruschetta from the presentation dish.  “Oh my gosh,” her daughter says into the camera.  “This is the nastiest thing I’ve ever had.  Seriously.  Don’t ever make this again.  I’m going to Shelly’s to eat macaroni and cheese.”  Then the poor little chef cries and gives her toddler an old piece of candy after all and we see her sneaking a beer in a red Dixie cup.

I’d be like YES!  I love this show!  I’m a huge fan!  You managed to make a crappy version of stir fry, sure.  But look at that salad! That’s good!  And you tried so hard, and you didn’t totally lose it with that dog water spillage thing, which is so impressive and shows how calm you were under pressure.  So what that your daughter didn’t like bruschetta?  She wears hot pink shirts and eats macaroni with powder sauce, so her credibility is nil.   It’s cool.  I’ll send you a recipe using a can of soup, some Ro-Tel, and some crumbled up chips and we can all feel like normal people.  Then I’ll go skipping off to the garden to find all my spoons and thank the stars that I’m not alone.

NBC, take note.   One of these days, just allow the chef to say what’s she’s actually thinking, which is “please don’t eat this.  I just tasted it, and honestly it tastes exactly like cardboard because it’s only pasta and peas with unsalted butter.  Next time I’ll find a sauce or a cream or something.  Really.  Trust me on this.”   I would.  I so totally would.

Let’s face it.  Despite our best intentions, you just sometimes have to eat toast.  Put butter and salt on it if you wish and call it garlic bread.  Add a song about how toast rhymes with roast and how the ghost gets the most.  Then forgive yourself for having breakfast for dinner, or the fact that you gave your kid candy, and that you have been wearing work-out gear for three days with no Chanel in sight.   Honestly, your kids don’t care.  They’re too busy eating to notice.

photo:

Scrambled Egg with Toast

Filed Under: Cooking, Embarrassing Moments, Humor, Motherhood, My life, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,

Odd and Curious Thoughts of the Week

April 30, 2012 By
  • Recipes are helpful.  Like telling me to use large eggs when making a Bundt cake.  I was just about to grab those tiny little quail eggs that I keep in my refrigerator when I had the forethought to double check.  Large eggs.  Wheh.  That was a close one.
  • I abhor having to type in those random letter combinations when I comment on another blog.  The caption always says something like “Prove to use you’re not a robot!”  Who came up with that phrase?  If a robot is smart enough to surf the web, come up with an email address, and put snarky comments on someone’s blog post, shouldn’t we be encouraging it?  Wouldn’t that be utterly awesome?  The phrase should instead read, “prove to me you’re not an internet scammer who wants to download a virus and steal my bank password.”  Or,  “enter in this stupid combination of letters because it’s automatic and I don’t know how to disable the damn thing.”
  • To prove my point about eggs, I went to the grocery store.  They have large and extra-large, and they are all the same price. I think we can quit referring to egg sizes, recipe people.  For those who actually live on a farm where the small ones are common, figure it out.
  • My sweet son is running a fever.  I feel just awful because he was extra cranky a few nights ago and I just might have made statements at dinner with friends similar to “that is so annoying” and “seriously, kiddo.  Deal with it. Just let me finish eating already.” I am heartless.
  • Tonight, our daughter came into our bedroom an hour after we thought she was asleep, lost in hysterical tears.  “I love my last name,” she sobs.  “I love the way it sounds when you say it all together, and someday when I get married I’ll have to change it.”  Uh, okay.  You’re five years old.  Most kids worry about getting a new backpack, and my daughter worries about losing her identity to her future spouse.  “You don’t have to change it,” my husband says, as if he’s disclosing some big secret.  “It can always be yours.  Love’s not found in a name, anyway.”  She is thrilled.  All is well again in the universe.
  • Last weekend, when we were working in the yard, my husband asked me if I’d seen the garden hoe.  I told him we shouldn’t discuss her in public, and especially around the children, for crying out loud.  Show some respect. 
  •  I get so excited when I hear the little ding on my iphone because I just know it’s the sound of an email – THE email – from the one literary agent who loves my novel and thinks it’s a bestseller in the making.  But it’s from Shutterfly, stating that they have new portrait mugs.  Well then.
  •  I thought about changing my blog name today to something whimsical like “graceful waters” or “she who runs with kitchen shears” instead of the super lame hill + pen. It’s like I am a caveman, beating my chest. I am hill.  I use pen.  I don’t even use a pen since I type everything.  But I was lazy and had laundry to fold.
  • Writing can be torture.  It’s lonely and sad, and you feel at times that it has no meaning.  But then you start envisioning someone laughing, or crying, or changing their behavior after reading your words, and you feel like a superhero.  At least that’s what you tell yourself to keep on writing.
  • This afternoon as I went to check the mail, I saw my neighbor and his wife standing in their front yard.  “Nice weather,” I shouted.  It’s what you say to be cordial.  It’s the neighborly thing to do. “Not if you’re digging a hole,” she yelled back.  I smiled and waived.  Yup, it’s no fun digging a – what?  Huh? Should I be concerned?

And it’s just Monday. . .

Filed Under: Humor, Motherhood, Writing Tagged With: , , , ,

pork chops for breakfast

March 26, 2012 By

While the rest of the Western world is baking muffins, chomping on triskets, and sucking on popsicles, I’m at home gnawing on a boiled egg.  It’s not because I particularly love eggs.  It’s just that I’m on a low-carb diet, which is the one thing I know works.  I have to start running to hasten the effects of weight loss because I can’t stand eating tortillas that taste like cardboard.

All our kids eat is carbohydrates, wrapped in bar form, or rolled into the size of a cereal pellet, or hardened into the shape of pasta.  I bake it and toast it and wallow in it, and yet I can’t eat a bite.  Our pantry really is a diabetic nightmare.  Oatmeal.  Buttery crackers.  Muffin Mix.  Cookies.  Oh, the cookies.  Sometimes I peek around the onion soup mix to see if the chocolate chips are still there, waiting for me to come to my senses. They are sitting there on the top shelf like a stoic friend, patient and still.

The worst is breakfast.  After a week of eating scrambled eggs, or peanut butter on a flatbread, or a processed low-carb bar, you’re a little tapped out.  I went online to try and find low-carb breakfast ideas.  It was packed with helpful information, like “why do you have to eat sweets for breakfast?  Try tuna!” and the always helpful “if you get sick of eggs, just add extra cheese.”  There were fifteen recipes for frittatas and a mock pancake recipe made from cottage cheese.  One recommended left over pork chops.

I don’t know about you, but when I get out of bed in the morning, after scrubbing away stale breath and sipping on hot coffee, all I can think of is tuna.  And pork chops.  And cottage cheese pancakes with no syrup.  Stop it.  My mouth is watering.

This is why no one can stay on a low-carb diet forever.  There has to be some wiggle room.  I punched down the bread dough I was making this afternoon (now that I quit my job I declared Monday “Bake Day.”  I’ve also declared Wednesday Spa Day and Friday Drinking-and-Gambling Day, so it all evens out), and realized I’d never eat a bite.  Who bakes bread and then fails to eat one single bite?

People who need to lose ten pounds.  That’s who.  They are over in the corner with a bad attitude eating a handful of almonds and a cheese stick.  Don’t go near those people.  They are bound to crack. Or pass out.  Or start stuffing tortilla chips down their pie hole whilst laughing eerily.

Soon, I’ll ease those lovely carbs back into my life.  Until then, I’ll just be here.  Quietly eating pork chops for breakfast but dreaming of thick, sweet oatmeal.

Filed Under: Health, Humor Tagged With: , ,