Well, Saturday night dinner wasn't a disaster but it was waaaaaayyy off par.
I had a whole chicken on the docket, since I wanted to make some broth. I figured a comfort food meal would be about in order, so I had some baked squash, side veggies, and salad on the menu, pretty straightforward and traditional.
The trouble started out when I realized about a half hour before I was supposed to start cooking the chicken that there was a big ball of ice in the cavity, encasing the giblet pack. Why the ball of ice was there in the first place, I know not. How would that much water get in there, anyway? It's more than the chicken would hold all on its lonesome. In any event, I went through 20 minutes of running water on the thing, poking it into the microwave, and trying to pry this ball of ice stuck to the inside of the chicken out. The upshot of all this frantic defrosting: dinner was an hour late in the end, which is not good when you have kids.
I like to cook a few potatoes and veggies in the pot with the chicken -- makes it roast more moistly and you get the bonus of having some nice basted vegetables. But I had somehow missed the fact we were out of carrots, and the three potatoes I had to use up were a bit more aged than I had thought. So they were a little sad out of the pan. I forgot to stir them, too. And then there was the salad -- I let a head of romaine sit a little too long, and some force of nature had pushed it to the back of the fridge, where it was too cold. It was either eat it up now or have it go bad altogether.
The squash I was baking came out fine, but I forgot I had to strip the skin off until just before serving time, so I was madly picking little bits of skin out of the kids' portions.
All in all, it's not like individual bits came out poorly, but the whole dinner felt off-kilter.
Which is to say, I think good cooking is as much about timing as anything. Timing of managing your ingredients, timing of the preparation, timing of the cooking, timing of the serving. I've been battling a low grade something or other that's been making feel ill for a while, and while the day can be a bit of a grind, I know I'm truly off when I can't get that cooking rhythm going.
What, you didn't expect this blog to be one of those haute cuisine, everything-I-cook-is-fabulous blogs, did you? How boring twould be, twere so!
In any event, lesson noted: sometimes you need to shunt the proceedings off to your sous chef du maison before you get yourself in trouble. I finally figured this out when it was time to get the broth cooked, and humbly requested the assistance of my better half to finish off the evening.
And now, I'm thinking maybe I should stock up on some spaghettios, just in case, for the next time my game is this far off. One downside of the meal plan discipline is sometimes the circumstances of the day call for one to simply chuck it out, shuffle something around, or go with a Plan C out of a can.
