Does anyone think that the advertisement of a 30-minute meal is just a big, fat lie? I have yet to make one in that amount of time!
Tonight I was looking for a quick fix. Pizza was out because we did that last night, and getting take-out two nights in a row would really not be very frugal. (Not that going out one night a week IS somehow frugal.) So I trotted down stairs to my basement food storage and pulled out a box of stuffing mix. The recipe on the back said something "Easy Chicken Casserole". Easy=Fast, no? Uh, no.
I started dinner almost an hour ago, and I just barely got it in the oven, where it must bake for 30 minutes! It took me so long to make the dinner that my oven stopped pre-heating, and now I have to pre-heat it all over again. Or maybe, it just took so long that I've forgotten whether I actually preheated it in the first place. (I'm pretty sure I did, though! But I must not have, because ovens just don't turn off by themselves, do they? Oh, can you see how fried my brain is!)
I think what it boils down to, is that cooking dinner means having to multi-task, and I just don't do that well. In the midst of tonight's meal preparation, I've supervised homework, broken up several arguments, watched Sariah dump the entire silverware drawer all over the kitchen floor, intercepted Sariah stealing Dallin's Valentine's party candy, supervised Dallin in the sharing of said candy with his sister, put wet tennis shoes on Dallin's feet, tried to find my hearing and my sanity in the midst of happy, screaming, running-around-like-crazy kids, and smiled and called out to my husband as he came in the door.
See, it really would be a 30-minute process if I had nothing else to do! But night after night dinner gets later and later, and I always start at the same time. How can that be? Am I normal?
Tonight I was looking for a quick fix. Pizza was out because we did that last night, and getting take-out two nights in a row would really not be very frugal. (Not that going out one night a week IS somehow frugal.) So I trotted down stairs to my basement food storage and pulled out a box of stuffing mix. The recipe on the back said something "Easy Chicken Casserole". Easy=Fast, no? Uh, no.
I started dinner almost an hour ago, and I just barely got it in the oven, where it must bake for 30 minutes! It took me so long to make the dinner that my oven stopped pre-heating, and now I have to pre-heat it all over again. Or maybe, it just took so long that I've forgotten whether I actually preheated it in the first place. (I'm pretty sure I did, though! But I must not have, because ovens just don't turn off by themselves, do they? Oh, can you see how fried my brain is!)
I think what it boils down to, is that cooking dinner means having to multi-task, and I just don't do that well. In the midst of tonight's meal preparation, I've supervised homework, broken up several arguments, watched Sariah dump the entire silverware drawer all over the kitchen floor, intercepted Sariah stealing Dallin's Valentine's party candy, supervised Dallin in the sharing of said candy with his sister, put wet tennis shoes on Dallin's feet, tried to find my hearing and my sanity in the midst of happy, screaming, running-around-like-crazy kids, and smiled and called out to my husband as he came in the door.
See, it really would be a 30-minute process if I had nothing else to do! But night after night dinner gets later and later, and I always start at the same time. How can that be? Am I normal?
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