Dinner Fail

My kids are so cute sometimes. I just need to keep reminding myself. Neither of them are particularly fond of using a bed in the traditional way...


This photo is not from tonight. Tonight they are doing their darnedest to stay awake and frustrate me. Aunty Mum-me can see that they both have their pillows she made on their bed (the one Lion has his head on and the one Lulu the purple sheep has her head on) and pity help anyone that tries to remove them. Or if I accidentally throw the pillows back on to the wrong bed when I find them on the floor... oh boy! My boys are great at creative sleeping as you can see here, here, here, here, here and here.

Have you seen the blog failblog.org? It's got some pretty funny stuff if you need a laugh. It's things like signs with spelling errors advertising schools, videos of people attempting to look cool and ending up looking like fools, that sort of stuff. Each picture usually has the word FAIL printed on it somewhere. I am thinking of starting a blog dinnerfail.org. The last three nights I would have had three entries. This is a phenomenon I have experienced each pregnancy. At some point towards the end my dinner cooking brain just shuts down. I cannot think of anything that I can make even though I have a cupboard and fridge full of ingredients and inevitably whatever I eventually remember how to cook requires an ingredient that I do not have.

Actually I need to correct myself, Sunday night I managed to do quite well. It was a bring a plate dinner at church so I took along some of my yummy cheesy sticks that are not so healthy or filling and ate everyone elses healthy and filling food. I don't think anyone minded since I brought the dish home empty! It must have been Saturday night when my brain switched off. I defrosted Pork chops. Wolf cooked them on the BBQ and then I freaked... what do I put with them? I could not think of a thing to go with them. Eventually I managed to throw together some roast veggies but it seemed like a mammoth task to do that one small dish. Usually that would be something I could do with my eyes closed... though I wouldn't because I don't want to cut off a finger using the sharp knife. Dinner Fail.

So Sunday was okay except that I couldn't think of what to take, it was only that I remembered my friends mum (J-Mac's grandma) saying she was doing a thing with pastry and she mentioned cheese and that reminded me that the cheesy sticks are a 5 minute to make, 5 minutes to cook thing that surely I couldn't muck up. Thankfully I had JUST ENOUGH cheese to do them.

Monday night, we did some groceries and I had a siren going in the trolley the whole time because Dragon didn't want to be put in the trolley but I didn't want him roaming the aisles because it was after school time and there were 7 year olds driving shopping trolleys. So he was making his displeasure known but when I mentioned that he was our siren Lion told me "No, if he was a siren his head would be spinning around"... okaaaay. So, we got the few things I knew I needed desperately and headed to get some chicken for dinner. I let the boys pick from everything in the Lenards windows explaining what each thing was in the hope that if they picked it they would eat it. They decided and we went home. I got it cooking and was just about ready to put it on plates and remembered that I had done NOTHING to go with it... at that point I couldn't even think of anything to go with it. The only salad thing we had was 1 tomato. There was no way I could get any veg done in time so I served up chicken cordon bleu for everyone. One breast in the middle of the plate (boys got half each). Nothing else. I told Wolf he could heat up the leftover spag-bog in the fridge and I was very sorry. Dinner Fail.

Tonight was slightly better. All afternoon I was trying to put ingredients together in my head to see if they rang any bells. Nothing. I knew I had mince but no spaghetti and once I got the spag-bog thought in my head I could think of nothing else. Eventually I remembered Mrs Nurse Boy's yummy scrummy Cheeseburger Roll Up. 'Easy' I thought to myself. Guess what... my cheesy sticks used the last of the cheese. I couldn't remember my 5 minute pizza base recipe and couldn't find the folder with it in, called Chimera for the recipe (since I've given it to her 500 times) but she wasn't home, I eventually found the recipe right at the point where it was make this or have the mince in a pile on the plate by itself. I made it. I totally mucked it up. Dinner Fail.

It somehow managed to be okay after cooking but it was touch and go for a while there. It wasn't the fault of Mrs NB's recipe... perhaps with the state of my brain I probably should have known better and gone back and read it. Mighta sorta helped. No, I defrosted the mince and then remembered that I had no cheese. Wolf arrived home and I dashed to the shops to buy some cheese... no money. I scrounged through the car and found enough cash to cover some cheese and headed home. At this point I was panicking about the recipe and had Wolf start browning the mince while I was out and not reading the recipe and not thinking I just got him to toss in a can of tomatoes. Unfortunately you really need this mix to not be sloppy. It was VERY sloppy now. I whipped up the dough while the sloppiness cooked away. The dough was too sloppy. This dough takes 5 minutes to make... maybe less. I have NEVER mucked it up before. it's that easy. I threw in a bit more flour to soak put the sloppiness of the dough. It kinda worked. I should have put in more, I came to roll it up and the sloppiness of the dough combined with the sloppiness of it's innards was all too much for it. It was oozing everywhere. I managed to get it to resemble some kind of roll and threw it in the oven and hoped for the best. It tasted pretty good. A lot of the ooziness ran off the tray and onto the bottom of the oven so that is a bit of a problem but it wasn't sloppy to eat. No one complained, they all seemed to enjoy it (except Lion picked out the chunks of tomato which I don't get too upset about because I HATED cooked tomato when I was little). Then I realised... I had nothing to serve it with. Oh well, it's got tomato in it, she'll be right mate. Anyway, tomorrow is another opportunity to fail day. Go back to the top and look at my cute kids again... awww. They are asleep now, praying for no nightmares tonight... goodnight.