Sweet

Kitchen Serendipity 

Some days just seem to drain you.  After a long day at work the gauntlet of preparing dinner, giving baths, helping with home work, and trying to spend quality time together as a family can sometimes be intimidating.  From time to time on days like that we have a “whatever” dinner.  This is where someone eats leftovers, someone eats cereal, someone has a sandwich, and someone wanders through the cabinets and refrigerator on a culinary scavenger hunt.  That last person is usually me.

Most of the time I put together something quick and easy and on rare occasion, even fairly tasty.  Sometimes I will get in a little over my head and can tell that the vision I had for the meal is falling apart.  That is when I rely on my basic guy instinct and apply a little culinary duct tape.  Bacon.  If something is going south in the kitchen, bacon can usually fix it.  Wrap it in bacon, sprinkle bacon bits on it, or in extreme cases just toss whatever you were making and enjoy a plate of bacon.

Every now and then I have a moment where it all comes together and I don’t even have to rely on the duct tape of food.  A few weeks ago I went to make a sandwich and realized we were out of a very key ingredient.  If I had poured a bowl of cereal and we were out of milk it would have been time to back up and punt because there are no real options there.  On this occasion, however, the peanut butter had already been applied and when  there was no jelly I decided to go for it on 4th and long.  I usually would have just had a peanut butter sandwich and forgone any other ingredients but on this night I was driven by creative inspiration.  What I did next is fairly amazing.  In fact you may want to sit down and buckle up for this because it has the potential to blow your mind and rock the culinary world.   Once I tasted my creation I realized how Edison must have felt or at the very least the guy who invented the Sham-Wow.

PEANUT BUTTER AND RAINBOW SPRINKLES SANDWICH

You are welcome.

Totally Sweet.

Weak

Would you care for a some anxiety with that? 

Is there a more nerve-racking experience in life than being with your significant other in the checkout line at the grocery store and realizing that you forgot something but deciding that there is time for one of you to run and get it before the last item in your cart crosses the scanner?  It is one of the quickest decisions ever made.  The time remaining for the rest of the items to be scanned is quickly estimated and then divided by the estimated time it will take me to find the tin foil and get it back to the register and then in a flash I am off.

When I am at the grocery store with my wife, I am like a passenger in a car.  Although we both arrive at the destination I have no clue how we got there.  I was too busy goofing around and looking out the window.  I know the foil is on an aisle with paper towels and garbage bags and other non-food items but where was it?  I remember seeing it but have no idea where.  The hour-long zig-zag march has disoriented me a bit, I am tired and hungry and know if I waste the time walking by every aisle I will never make it.  I am on the other side of the checkout lines now, back in the sea of cans and boxes and I look back to my wife for some kind of helpful signal.  I need her to hold up a sign that says aisle 12 but instead, the look I get is more of an emotional cocktail, 2 parts frustration, 1 part disdain, and 1 part anxiety.  I try to clear my head and scan the signs hanging from the ceiling.  Somehow an aisle with 1,400 different items is classified by a sign that lists six.

Suddenly as if a ray of light parted the heavens I see the words tin foil on the sign hanging for aisle 10.  I dart in that direction and find the foil.  Luckily it is at the end closest to the checkout lanes.  Unfortunately there are 72 different kinds of foil.  I want to text my wife for her guidance knowing that somehow even for a product as simple as foil I would pick the wrong kind.  I start to scan the different varieties but there is no time.  THERE IS NO TIME!

I grab the roll closest to me and it is as long as my leg.  I am sure I don’t remember having something like this in our house, probably wouldn’t even fit in our cabinet.  I grab the next closest roll and I go!  Feeling like Indiana Jones running from a giant boulder,  I weave my way through the crowded masses holding the foil high in the air.  I make eye contact with my wife for a split second before they roll away and see her folding the receipt and putting it in her purse.

Failure.

I knew that the seconds had been ticking down and I was out of time outs but I considered a Hail Mary and throwing the foil to her across 3 or 4 other checkout lanes.  While that would have been awesome and other husbands would have told of my heroics until it became legend, I restrained.  Instead I walked up to customer service where there was no line, put the foil and a five dollar bill on the counter and was next to my wife bag in hand before she made it to the automatic door.  Work smarter not harder.

Realizing you forgot something while in the checkout line is totally weak.