Julia Child I am Not

It was a rough week in our household.  We seemed to be attacked from all directions, and I am very thankful that it is Friday!

To top it all off, I had some particular cooking struggles this week.  Lest anyone should ever get the mistaken impression that I have it all together, let me set the record straight!

To begin with, I'm not a connoisseur of the culinary arts.  Cooking is a task that I gladly do to care for my family, but it's not a love of mine-- mainly because I hate cleaning up the mess from a large cooking project.  We've also struggled with food allergies, so that wipes out roughly 67.4538% of all recipes.  I enjoy some new recipes from time to time, but I am not a chef at heart.   What I make for my family is fairly simple and usually fills up the tummy-- or should I say, six tummies.

Anyway, the following is a recap of our incredible unusual dinners this week.

Monday-- Menu:  beef rice-a-roni, loaf of Italian bread, and salad.  Reality: the boxes of beef rice-a-roni turned out to be chicken rice-a-roni, which I didn't realize until I had browned the ground beef and was ready to dump in the seasonings.  We ended up having the delectable strange combination of taco meat with tortillas, chicken rice-a-roni with no chicken in it, a loaf of Italian bread, and salad.  (I rescued the browned ground beef with a packet of taco seasoning thanks to Josiah's suggestion.)

Tuesday- really rough day.  Menu: hamburgers on the grill with chips and veggies.  Reality:  The beef wasn't thawed, so I put it in water to speed up the process not realizing that there was a hole in the plastic.  Soggy, smushy, water-logged ground beef met me an hour later, and after sobbing at the kitchen sink, I was lovingly rescued by my husband who took us on a surprise ride to get dinner out instead.

Wednesday- Menu: Spaghetti with meat sauce and salad.  I'm still wondering what happened to the other jar of sauce that I am sure was in the cupboard.  Instead of having meat with our sauce, we had sauce with our meat (over noodles that were two different varieties).  The homemade garlic bread would have been great too-- if I hadn't run out of butter.  No Italian cooking TV gigs for me anytime soon.

Thursday- Menu: Chicken and dumplings.  This one actually made it to the table.  I'm not sure, but the sauce may have been slightly scorched when I was trying to start laundry while cooking dinner.  I don't always multi-task very well, but once in awhile we need clean undies and socks to go with our chicken and dumplings.

So what's for dinner tonight?

Paul is cooking.  Grilling, I think.  Maybe hamburgers, but I haven't gone anywhere near the fridge to see.  I don't want to jinx it.

Julia Child I most definitely am not.