Bon Appétit!

Right before writing this post, I looked down at my finger and realized that I had a large (though painless) cut right at the tip. It took me a full ten seconds to remember how this had happened--somehow I had cut myself opening a jar. Five minutes ago. Yes.

This is a typical day in the life of Emily. 1) Hurt yourself doing something simple and everyday. 2) Forget that you did it because you have the memory of a wombat. (Wombat? What is wrong with me? *Sigh*, moving on.) I am constantly covered in bruises, not because I have a disease, but because I run into things. And then I forget that I did. I get at least one rather nasty, deep-looking bruise a year and when people see it I usually hear this: "*GASP!* Oh my gawwwwd! What HAPPENED?!" To which I reply, "Oh, uh...ran into a wall maybe?"

My forgetfulness and clumsiness also wrap quite nicely into another lovely quality of mine: a distinct lack of cooking elegance. And these qualities I blame on my mother. Not that my mom is a bad cook. She makes some KILLER dishes. And have I mentioned the Chex Mix? Ohhhhh, the Chex Mix. My stars. But my mom will be the first to admit, she is no Martha Stewart. Let me tell you about Saturday night.

I went home to spend some time with The Fam before my little sister, Hannah, went back to school. For dinner, my mom wanted to try a dish she had made once before, chicken wrapped in puff pastry.

The box of the pastry said to let it thaw for 40 minutes, but it just wasn't thawing fast enough. I suggested she defrost it in the microwave, because I was sure I had seen that suggestion on the box somewhere. I then walked away from the kitchen.

Next thing I know, my mom is cursing my name to the heavens because she microwaved the puff pastry while it was still rolled (note that I never told her to do THAT) so it had turned into a roll of goo and she couldn't unroll it anymore and what was she going to do noooooow??

So I start laughing and trying to pry the damn thing open with a butter knife, which just ends in further massacre. We're both covered in flour, uncooked chicken goo and (mysteriously) soy sauce, and the puff pastry, which is supposed to be a flat square, looks roughly like the state of Idaho.

While my mom is lamenting, "This would NEVER happen to Julia Child!" my dad comes home and starts mocking us. Lovely, Dad, thank you for the advice. He then pours us both a glass of wine and tells us it'll still taste fine. My mom tries to convince Hannah to go out into the cold and buy us more puff pastry, which she refuses to do because she is useless. Meanwhile, the pets need to be fed, so Wally the cat/horse is at our feet, reaching as high as he can. And yes, he CAN reach the counter top. So on this counter top (which is about two feet wide, by the way), we have the Idaho dough, flour everywhere, chicken/salmonella, vegetables, multiple spoons, sauce, cat food, groping cat paws, and two glasses of wine.

Ahh, home.

Perhaps anticlimactic, but in the end, we rolled it out to an acceptable shape and you couldn't tell which was the batch we'd messed up and which we hadn't. Which makes me love puff pastry THAT much more.

And thus, my family (and my clumsiness) lives another day.