Din-Din

I'm often amazed by what happens to food between the time I see it on a grocery store shelf and when I throw out its mouldy remains from my fridge.

Take last night's dinner, for example. Hubby, who was the last-one-out-in-the-car, called me from the grocery store. "They don't have any pre-cooked chickens," he said tiredly. "I'm stumped."

"It's okay," I said. "Just buy anything that should feed five people - I've already started some fried rice."

He turned up with twelve chicken thighs, backs attached, and two jars of some Indian sauce. "These are what I bought last time, aren't they?" he asked. They weren't, last time he'd bought chicken breasts, but he was unconvinced and proceeded to try to persuade me that this was indeed the same cut of meat he'd bought last time.

Busy with my chopping, I declined the invitation to fight, and let it drop. He was, uncharacteristically, too tired to continue the argument alone. I went on chopping celery, my rice frying happily.

Then we had a phone call from an elderly neighbour I'd been concerned with earlier in the day. There's this guy, a great big hulking lout of a man, who frequents her house whenever his welfare cheque runs out, and he does yard work for her. He scares the willies out of me, and I often worry that one day he would try to force his way in... but that is not today's topic. Yesterday, Hubby held his cell phone up to my ear as I was trying to chop stuff for the fried rice, and while I was thus engaged in conversation with my friend, the rice burned.

First wrinkle in the dinner plans.

Fortunately, I'd seen it right away and removed the pan from the burner. I scooped out the worst bits and left the pan off the burner till I was finished chopping. Hubby said "Sorry," and I said only, "just leave the rest out. As soon as I've got this seasoned I'll start on the chicken."

Hubby, who was dead-tired, was not so easily deterred. Martyr complex aside, he knows that lots of noise and activity bustling around me when I'm trying to make dinner within a specific length of time often upsets me - a LOT - and he dutifully began trying to take the skin off the first piece of chicken. It didn't LOOK like that, you understand. He was massacring it - bending the bones this way and that, cutting off most of the usable meat and leaving the skin firmly attached.

"DARLING!" I shouted. The word I used was "darling," but It must have sounded like "SHITHEAD!", because that was in fact, the way I meant it...

"I'm only trying to help," he said feebly.

"Go lie down!" I ordered him. I've got this COVERED!"

"Are you sure?" his voice whined.

I was ready to explode. How many times, how many different ways, would I have to say it till this man would leave me alone and let me THINK!

He finally exited, and I could get back to my rice. Celery, carrot, broccoli, leftover chicken meat, pepper, salt, three cups of water... something was missing... I tossed in some Basil, realized that was a mistake, but no getting it out now, put the lid on, and started to heat the oven.

As I was stirring the two jars of sauce into the pot, tearing off as much excess fat from the chicken as I could without picking up a tool, it dawned on me that the rice would be ready in ten minutes, while the chicken still had an hour to run. So I turned off the burner under the rice and gave the chicken my full attention. Minutes later, with every piece thoroughly coated, I stacked them up in the corningware pot, stuck it in the oven and set the timer for 45 minutes. Washed up, and left the kitchen to go to the sewing room.

When the buzzer rang, out came the chicken, still mostly raw. I put it on a baking tray, skin side up, and spooned sauce over it. Back in the oven for 30 minutes, and I proceeded to peel some apples for a quick apple crisp. No time to look up the recipe - I winged it totally. Had time for a quick run back to the sewing room.

Twenty minutes later, my spider-senses tingling, I arrived in the kitchen just in time to see the level of fat in the shallow tray about to come spilling over the top. I found the baster, and it was thus that Hubby found me, with oven door open, bowl of fat resting on the oven door, sucking out fat with the baster and dumping it in the bowl. Wanted to know what I was doing.

What is it about men that they always need to have the obvious explained to them, anyway?

And so a few minutes later, with the chicken and rice in serving bowls and the apple crisp in the oven, all five of us sat down to dinner. (Stepson had asked his girlfriend to join us - this time I'd had an hour's notice! Whee.)

Not enough though apparently, as Girlfriend didn't eat rice.

For crying out loud - who doesn't eat RICE?

He made her eat a bit off his fork, but teenage girls will be teenage girls. She had one measly piece of chicken and swore she was full.

I dutifully picked up a forkful of my burnt, over-cooked rice, and...

I'd never tasted anything so good.

I didn't hear much of what was being said around the table, trying to remember what the heck I'd done with the rice that made it taste so good! Could it have been the small handful of raisins I'd tossed in? I'd forgotten to put in onion - usually a staple when one is trying to make something out of rice... I'd meant to toss in a bay leaf, but had become flustered when I'd put in the Basil... I'd also forgotten the soya sauce, so the rice, despite being slightly scorched, wasn't particularly brown... The chicken I'd thrown in had been the remains of a store-cooked barbecued chicken we'd had four days previously, nothing special there...

Yet it tasted like food of the gods. Got compliments from everyone (except Girlfriend, of course).

The chicken tasted like chicken, nothing special. Everyone had two or three pieces, except aforementioned girlfriend.

Later, while we were piled on the couches in front of the tv, we demolished the apple crisp, which had apples cooked to perfection that melted on the tongue, and a crunchy topping that tasted like caramel.

Best apple crisp I ever made. And damned if I can remember what I did!