Learning New Tricks

I fixed dinner tonight. This isn’t something I do very often. First of all, Pam is a terrific cook, while I’m more of a terrific consumer. This symbiotic relationship has served both of us quite well over the years. However, there are times when she needs a break from the kitchen. She hasn’t been feeling great for a couple days and this afternoon came home from work with an ailing, albeit sexy voice. She had planned on making my favorite soup. The recipe was laying on the counter. I glanced over it and thought, “I got this.”

It didn’t seem all that complicated, just a bunch of slicing of vegetables and what not. I gathered all the ingredients and laid them out on the counter and got to work. Along the way I did have to bother her with questions—which was a pain, because if I hadn’t the poor thing would have taken a nice long nap on the sofa. Instead I kept asking stuff like…When it says one Tablespoon of Olive Oil, what kind of olive oil do I use?? There’s like four different bottles in here and they all say different stuff! She also had to remind me that the minced garlic called for in the recipe would be the kind in the refrigerator, not the minced garlic in the spice rack…that kind of thing. Nevertheless, once I got started it was quite fun. Cutting up the celery, carrots and onions was cool. I found myself making a game out of it, seeing how fast I could cut up an entire carrot without slicing off the tips of my fingers—probably not a wise move. The most time consuming part of the process was shredding up the collard greens. Pam says she always takes off the big thick veins that run down the middle of each leaf. That was kinda boring. Once I got everything chopped and in the pot I had around 30 minutes to kill. So, I got everything together to make the Red Lobster Cheddar Biscuits, since any idiot knows that you can’t have Black Eyed Peas and Collard Green soup without biscuits. Pam was ambivalent about the notion of me cooking two separate things at once and offered to make the biscuits herself. But, I refused her offer because I wanted her to rest and I was feeling it.

So I look in the pantry and see that there is a box that had already been opened. Pam had used half the ingredients a few days ago to make just five biscuits for the two of us. I look at the box and think…this is perfect. I’ll just half the ingredients and make another five. Everything was going perfectly. The soup was simmering and smelling wonderful. I had preheated the oven like a champ. All I had to do is dump the mix, some cheese and some water in a mixing bowl and get the biscuits in the oven. But when I started mixing everything up I knew that something was wrong. Instead of dough that could be fashioned into biscuits the bowl was swimming with thin, yellow dough-soup! I had halved every ingredient perfectly except the water. Pam calmly walked into the kitchen and opened a new box of Red lobster biscuit mix, and handed me half of the flour to correct my error. Embarrassing.

But, I am happy to report that everything was delicious. Pam’s voice is even lower than it was when she got home. But at least she didn’t have to make dinner!