Dinner

Or, There are no good solutions

For those of you who read this blog but haven't spoken to me in person lately, I'm currently house sitting for a friend.

My primary duties are to a) not burn down the house, and b) keep the cats alive. Ordinarily, I would probably feel fairly confident at succeeding in these two tasks. At present, though I'm not taking any bets. I think it's a wonder that I haven't cut of my own arm with a box of cling-wrap yet.

At the moment, it's a toss-up as to who dies of starvation first - the cat who hasn't eaten anything (that I've observed) over the past two days, or me. One of the cats has no problems with my being here, and is quite happy to eat what I put on the floor. The other seems to be trying to hide in whatever cupboard I didn't check last, and freaks out slightly whenever he notices I'm not one of his people. Hence, he catches sight of me and bolts, and does not seem to care for whatever food I may offer. Heck, he even turned up his nose at fresh chicken!

Which leads me to tonight's dinner, and the fact that I almost gave up on having it about four or five times in the course of the evening.

I had this plan, see, I would go to the shop on the way home and buy the ingredients for something I could cook tonight which would give me left-overs for the next couple of nights. Along with the tuna casserole I managed to cook last night (after some trials and tribulation), that would mean I had all meals set until Saturday.

Something simple, something quick, something reasonably good for me - a chicken and vegetable stirfry with sauce and rice. What could possibly go wrong? I was so sure that this would be an easy meal to cook that I didn't even bother starting to get everything ready until 7pm. Heck, this sort of thing takes fifteen minutes to prepare and about as long to cook, right?

The Vegetable Peeler

The first thing I did was start cutting up the vegetables... sort of. The first vegetable I put my hand on was a carrot. It was the only vegetable I had to peel, but I find the skin of carrots to be a bit bitter, so I always peel them if I can. I went looking for the vegetable peeler. And I kept looking for the vegetable peeler.

You'd think something like this would be fairly easy to locate, but, no, for some reason the Hoopers prefer to have their pizza cutters and melon ballers in easy reach, but not the vegetable peeler. I looked through every drawer two or three times before picking the most likely drawer and practically pulling every item out one at a time.

I found about four or five bottle openers. I found three graters (including a ridiculously tiny one which must surely have been for purely decorative purposes). I found dozens of things for cutting vegetables into shapes. I found biscuit cutters. I found basting brushes and spatulas. I found funny little plastic thingies designed to keep your plastic bags shut. I found several ice-cream scoops. I found a number of things I didn't recognise and couldn't fathom the purpose of. When I found the little brass hammer that looked like something a cobbler would have in his workshop, I almost gave up there and then.

Finally, after more than fifteen minutes of searching, I found the vegetable peeler - right at the back of the drawer, under two garlic presses and a tea-strainer.

I think I made a complete mess of the drawer.

I don't care.

After that, the chopping of vegetables and cutting of meat seemed to go off fairly smoothly. I thought the dinner wouldn't be that far away. I was wrong.

The Electric Stove

Now, I'm not a big fan of electric cook-tops. I've grown up cooking with gas, and I just can't judge electric. I never know which are the fast elements and how long it takes them to heat up or cool down... Now, with gas, you can actually see the flame, so you know exactly how hot things should be.

I completely misjudged this stove. I had the rice cooking too quickly (even though it was on the lowest setting) and the chicken not cooking quickly enough (even thought it was on the highest. If I was smart, I would have worked out that I needed to swap the pots so that they were on the better elements for what I wanted. I wasn't smart.

Instead, I panicked, and decided to chuck the vegetables in with the chicken even thought it wasn't cooked enough, just to get them started before the rice went "too far".

Do you ever have one of those days when there are no good solutions? Everything you do to try to make something better ends up making it worse? Well, everything I did to try to make the chicken cook faster made it less likely to cook properly at all. Everything I did to slow down the rice just made it more of a gluggy mess.

Finally, after almost an hour of trying to figure all this stuff out, I decided the only course of action was the nuke the whole thing and hope for the best. So, my stirfry became a microwaved casserole and my rice became... porridge.

There were a few times when I thought I was likely to loose control of the situation entirely and have a whole kitchen to clean up, but finally, after 8:30pm, and without too much mess, I sat down to my honey and sesame chicken casserole and rice porridge.

And, guess what? I've got plenty of left-overs for the next few nights' dinners.

*sigh* It's a good thing I like rice porridge, eh?