meals in minutes.

Stuart bought a cookbook recently, "Meals in Minutes," in a new concerted effort to learn to cook.  The selling point of this book is that you can throw together a delicious well-balanced meal quickly.  The intro reads: "Sharing homemade meals is a fading ritual, too often replaced by television or a slice of pizza ... However, you hold in your hands the book that shows you how to create wonderful dishes without a lot of fuss and bother."

On Wednesday night he was going to make some curried chicken with rotini dish.  At two-thirty he was pulling the meat out of the freezer and asked if Mark and I wanted to join the family for dinner. Of course! Well would you mind picking up three more cans of this... he looks at the can... reduced fat Cream of Chicken soup?  I'm on it, I said.

When I brought the soup home the chicken was no longer on the counter-top.  I guess the dinner process was already underway. I put the soup on the counter and left, yelling up the stairs that I would be home by 6:45.  Dinner would be served, I was informed, at 7:15.  Wake Forest would be playing Duke in basketball so we would eat in front of the TV. Please refer back to the Cookbook's tag line.

The smell of something hit me when I walked in the basement door from outside. My apartment has its own entrance and I was surprised to smell dinner all the way downstairs.  Mark arrived and we discussed the wedding over a glass of wine while waiting for dinner.  

Around 7:20 Kim marched down the stairs in her flannel pajama pants and red fleece, classic post-work-I-don't-care-I'm-not-leaving-the-house garb.  

"Time for dinner?" I asked, getting up.

"No." She rolled her eyes with a laughing in them.  "We're having frozen Costco pizza."  Please refer back to Cookbook tag line again.

"What??  What happened to Chicken Curry Cream Pasta thing?  He's been working on it all day!"

"Well, yeah, you know you'd think that you couldn't botch a meal in minutes, wouldn't ya.  Well apparently Stuart added two entire--" making a little hand motion to indicate the two-inch-tall plastic container, searching for the right word "--things of curry powder!  And then, you know, it tastes awful so he keeps adding more milk! I mean he's got about three huge cookers full of this curried milk sauce.  You have to get the milk up to temperature but he got impatient so he turned the heat up under the pot and scalded the milk! So two gallons of milk, all this chicken, curry powder, vegetables... we're throwing it out.  It stinks up there, like something rotting. It's foul."  

Mark and I were laughing at this point. 

"But thanks to Costco we have pizza.  Y'all want some pizza?"

We nodded, my eyebrows raised.

"So what is Stuart doing right now?" I asked.

"Well the Wake Forest game is on now, so he's lost any concern about dinner.  He's up there with a glass of wine and his buddy's here..."

She laughed and tossed her hair back as she turned toward the garage door to get the pizza.  "I swear..."  

Lesson: the only simple thing is spaghetti and meals in minutes don't exist, at least not around these parts.