Of dogs and dinners

I've got my lap top, kindle and iPhone all going at the same time, so if this blog implodes, at least you will know why.  I still cannot believe I caved and purchased an iPhone. I am so not an apple grrrrl.  But, in the end, all those cool features that the wife is always oooh-ing and ahhhh-ing about won out.  The camera alone makes it worth while because if you saw the photos I take with my "real" camera, you would understand my pain.

I wasn't going to blog about the dinner (just wait--I'll get there) but all bets are off, now that the wife has admitted she hasn't been keeping up with my blog.  Here I thought the person sitting across the kitchen table was a regular reader.  Imagine my surprise when she didn't know about my ball chair antics or other dribble from the Addiverse.  The shame, the horror, the pain.

So, I shall now speak of the "Great Dinner Disaster of 2012."  (It really wasn't a disaster but the wife kept exclaiming, "this is a DISASTER!" so it must have been at least a little traumatic. Perhaps disaster-esque is more appropriate.)

.....before I get to that, I need to make a confession right now: I am playing veterinarian with our dog.  I just couldn't bring myself to take her back to the vet and pay even more money to try other antics to fix her itchy eye.  I did many a web search and learned all sorts of ways to address allergies and itching.  Since the first round of vet bills didn't cure her, I decided it was time to take things into my own hands. After checking one last time to make sure a tooth wasn't sprouting out of her snout, I pulled out my dog medicine cabinet (trust me, I've got a canine pharmacy going on in our kitchen), perusing the leftovers from Freckles brush with death last spring.  I mixed and matched what I had learned on line and what I had pretty much known from previous bouts of allergies.  It was time to pull out the big guns....I reached for the almost full bottle of prednisone.

I did oodles of research, checking dosages and dangers, so i felt pretty confident I wouldn't kill her with my new-found career.  I knew that if I took Lucy to the vet, they'd just suggest giving her a shot of some form of steroid, so I thought it best to give it a whirl with what I had in hand.  After much calculation and consideration, I laid out the three week plan and began the treatment.

May I just say that after three days the improvement was so profound that I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it? Her eye is no longer swollen and yucky.  Her chin isn't red and puffy.  Best of all, she's not throwing herself all over the rug in an effort to scratch all those things that itch.  She hasn't kept us up all night with all that obnoxious (and probably quite painful to her) scratching.  I can actually see the white of her eye again.  Praise the baby jesus, I think we might be on the road to recovery.

Now, I know lots of negatives come with using steroids but this was a necessary evil.  It's very short term.  I also know I haven't identified the cause of the allergies, so that hasn't been cured--I've just put a band aid on the problem.  For now, I'll take the band-aid and two good eyes.

Back to the supposed "disaster."


The wife and I decided to have our friends Otis and Newman over for dinner.  Whenever we go to their house, Newman makes us all sorts of delectable tidbits...home-made, fresh, probably organic, always a new recipe to try, always incredibly tasty and healthy to boot.  We're talking cold soups, interesting ingredients, molten cakes.  Nothing for the faint of heart.  We always feel guilty when we finally have them over because we usually end up doing something like pizza.  It is intimidating to cook for those that actually know how.  The wife decided this time to make something in the crock pot, because nothing ever goes wrong in the crock pot.  I have to admit that in our quarter century of cooking, we have never had one mishap with a crock pot adventure.

You DO realize where this is going, don't you?

The wife decided to make a new chicken crock pot dish. I focused on convincing her that we needed a salad and something other than the chicken.  I was surprised when the wife announced she was going to try something new, as it is NEVER a good idea to try out a recipe on people other than with whom you live.  She seemed very confident, announcing that the dish "only needs three ingredients and the chicken," adding that she got it from her "light" cooking book.  (Newman is very fond of Weight Watchers, so this seemed like a nod to her efforts.)  For one-millisecond, I was skeptical and opened my mouth to protest trying something new when serving dinner guests.  But, I was lured in to the 100% success rate of our crock pot endeavors and thus said nary a word.  I went back to arguing about what side dishes would compliment the chicken.  Somehow, spring rolls and fruit fluff ended up on the menu, so I was really happy.   I stopped worrying about the chicken and focused on the fluff.  I went to work and left the fretting to the wife.

I came home an hour or two before our guests were to arrive.  I, a non-teacher, had been working all day.  The wife, a teacher, had been at home torturing herself over this dinner. (I'm guessing that going to work was a much less stressful day than fretting at home.)  One look at the wife's face told me something was very, very wrong--in fact, she looked so distressed that I thought someone might have died.  She turned to me, eyes moist with tears and exclaimed, "IT'S A DISASTER!"

I looked toward the crock pot and gave her the "one eyebrow raised question look."  After I established the the disaster was in the crock pot and that no one had died, I stepped closer to the counter where she was leaning (head now in hands). While repeated several times about how this is a disaster, I thought how can a crock pot be a disaster? No one has crock pot disasters. We've never had one thing go wrong with a crock pot meal.....

....and then, I looked in the crock pot and realized we had a disaster on our hands.

"What happened?" I asked in my most empathetic, sympathetic tone.

"I don't know! Oh my god, what are we going to do! This is a disaster!"

I peered in.  The chicken looked like little dried hockey pucks.  "It looks kind of dry."

The wife looked like she was going to vomit.  "I can't serve this!"

I took another gander and asked her to cut a piece so I could see.  Oh dear.  Hockey pucks. (Does anyone else think it's funny that the vegetarian is checking to see how the chicken looks?)  It was dry as a bone.  "I don't understand.  Did you cook it longer than you were supposed to?"

The wife shook her head "no."  I paused and then in the most supportive-non-judgmental tone I could muster asked, "Did you have it on high?"

She let out a squeak, trying to hold in the sob....."No! It was on low.  I followed the directions. This is such a disaster!"

In an effort to lower her anxiety, I explained that this was not a disaster.  The space shuttle exploding, wars in foreign countries, Madonna's latest album sales--those were disasters.  "You're right.  We can't serve that."  I used my art-enhanced-right-brained creativity and confirmed, "isn't one of their favorite places to eat the Imperial Castle?"  The wife nodded in a very tentative manner.  "Do you know what Newman likes to eat?" (I figured this was a really easy question as the wife and Newman have eaten lunch there a bazillion times.)  The wife had a moment of terror cross her face. I could tell she didn't know what Newman liked to eat, even though Newman ordered the exact same thing every time they went out for lunch. Through process of elimination while staring at the take-out menu, the wife was able to identify a few potential dishes. "She gets the one with "woody-ear" but she gets it without the woody-ear."  I offered to go pick up the chinese take out if she called to order it.  I'm not sure how she was able to pull herself together enough to find the number and make the call, but she did.  She wisely asked the worker about the ingredients of the "potential Newman dishes" of favor....and, with this information was able to identify Newman's treasured dish.  We guessed on something safe that Otis might like, staying with the chicken theme.  It was a huge bonus when the worker indicated that they had free delivery and would be there in an hour or less.

While waiting for the delivery guy, I tried to convince her that we would get a really good laugh out of this but the look on her face alerted me that it was a little too soon to be laughing or making such statements.  I did have a moment of panic, wondering what we would do if the delivery guy failed to surface as promised, but with that the doorbell rang and we were saved from certain doom.

I knew that Otis and Newman wouldn't have cared if we served them cereal with soy milk. It was just the stress of the chicken-gone-wrong that made it hard to remember that.

Once the food arrived, the arguing commenced.  Can I just say that we don't have any matching serving bowls? In fact, we really don't have many serving bowls of any kind.  Why, oh why didn't I go ahead and let people buy us gifts for our civil union? We could use some serving bowls and dinner plates.  We were finally able to get a grip and figure out some bowls that would suffice for serving of the food products.

I think Otis and Newman were tickled pink and quite entertained by the chinese take out and the story of the chicken-gone-wrong.  It wasn't a disaster at all and the fruit fluff was a huge hit.

Maybe we should have put the fruit fluff on the hockey puck chicken.....

....personally, I think we should just say no to having people over for dinner and go out for meals instead.  I know this great chinese restaurant.....I hear they have "woody-ear" dishes that don't need the woody-eat....