Tag: Dinner

Dinner Recap

How did I do cooking dinner tonight? Let’s recap.

Jen and I both liked the chicken. I ruined the roasted green beans. Burned to a crisp. They looked like twigs.

The quinoa though… I don’t know what I did, but I aced the quinoa. Jen and I agreed. It has something to do with the onions. I need to just slightly over cook them and for some reason that makes the whole dish taste like an A+. If only I could do it consistently.

Coming Home Tomorrow

My step son is coming home tomorrow. Have I mentioned that? Do you/they know it’s christmas time at all?

Jen just came into my bedroom/office/work nook and said that to her, today feels like Friday. It was a great minds think alike moment because I had been thinking the same thing all day. It’s only Wednesday but it totally feels like Friday. That’s going to make the next two days suck. I checked my work schedule tomorrow and it’s blank. I don’t have any meetings booked at all. It’s almost creepy.

My christmas wrapping is almost done. Did I mention that? I’ve still got a couple of things on the way (package delivery, a symptom of ‘Covid Christmas Too’) but as of now, everything I have to wrap is wrapped… and there are still 10 days left until christmas. That is also almost creepy.

I was going to do car music this morning, but I didn’t. I did a couple of errands instead. I snaked the drain like a faux plumber. As it turned out, I was able to sneak in everything I had left to do during lunch. You may have noticed that there wasn’t a lunch break blog post (no you didn’t. No one did. No one should). Two songs need both rhythm and lead guitar parts. Four just need lead guitar. Two more are already ready to mix. Music, ya know?

Bruce Dickinson from Iron Maiden has a podcast. World class fencer, airline pilot, novelist, metal god. The dude has range. It’s called Psycho Schizo Espresso. It’s Bruce and a psychologist talking about stuff. Okay, I’ll give it a spin.

Four minutes until the work day ends. Fingers crossed nothing comes my way during those four minutes, because I am cooking dinner tonight and the oven is already pre-heated. Chicken and Quinoa. They should call Chicken and Quinoa, ‘The Robert’ because it’s pretty much the only dish I am capable of making.

Three minutes to go…

Okay, clicking Publish now.

What is Up Tomorrow

Tomorrow is going to be a weird day. I’m nearly done with the work task I mentioned before that I really wanted off my plate on Monday. I need to wrap that up and send it off, then go to a couple of meetings and then BAM! Half day. Yeah, I took the afternoon off for no good reason at all.

The only definite item on my post-work agenda is cooking dinner. Outside of that? No idea. I’d like to do some music. I have two songs ready to mix. If I can sneak out for some car music before work I might have some leads to record too. That’s a big if though.

There is a new Hawkeye episode tomorrow. Hopefully we can set up a watch party with Harry and all watch it together. We will see.

Based on what I’ve written so far I’m sure the question burning a hole in your very soul right now is, what am I cooking for dinner?

I’ll end this post with the life affirming, world rocking answer:

Spaghetti and meatballs. Awww yeah.

Chef Lardo

The chicken is in the oven, the veggies are all prepped. I have about 7.5 minutes before I have to start prepping the quinoa, and I typo’d the word “the” twice in the first sentence.

Yup, it’s time for bed.

It’s December 6th today and the weather is weird. It was raining and blah all day, but it was also warm. The temps were in the high 50’s. I actually thought about opening up some windows, and I had my little desktop fan on for a while. How crazy is that?

Today at lunch I read about a mini-galaxy with a black hole at the center that is almost as big as ours. That does not compute, but it is also awesomely cool. There was a lot of online buzz about the two Walking Dead shows from last night. Well… not Fear, that show was atrocious and pretty much everyone agrees. No, the item of interest happened a couple hours after the episode aired when they announced the original lead character, who was supposed to have been killed off three years ago, is coming back. Oh good. I sure the writing they use to pull that off will be stellar. Yes.

Also, lots of buzz about the end of World Beyond. Specifically the post credit scene where we visit another country for the first time, and a tie in to the original show’s season one finale. It’s interesting and all, but it seems odd to give us a cliff hanger at the end of a show that literally no longer exists. I mean, it would have worked better if they told us where we could expect the pay off to come from. As it is we know there’s a road trip spin off from the main show coming, an anthology show which seems like a convenient excuse to bring back dead characters without retconning the way the morons at Fear are about to, and a set of hypothetical, near mythical movies. Safe to assume any payoff would be in the theaters, but who the hell knows. Whatever, the end of World Beyond was pretty satisfying and on the whole the two seasons ended in a way that makes me happy I stuck with it.

Okay. Time to prep the quinoa. Enough of this TV recap bullshit. It’s time for Chef Lard Ass to get-a-cookin’!

Sunday

I made a command decision today. I am not putting christmas lights on the house this weekend. Maybe next weekend. Maybe wait until Harry comes home and gamble with the weather. I just don’t have it in me today.

The christmas present deliveries have begun in earnest. UPS and Fed Ex and Amazon all have setup distribution centers in our front yard. So far they are all getting along with each other but I am a little worried about the possibility of some sort of gang war breaking out. I’ll keep ’em in line. I used to work for UPS so if the other two gang up on them I’ll clearly side with my former people, but I hope it doesn’t come to that.

Jen is cooking a huge Sunday dinner. Robert is lucky. So very lucky.

I haven’t played any guitar today. There was a window of time this morning where I could have, but I did not. In true rock and roll fashion, I declared that 9:00am was too early and watched some Tacoma FD instead.

We have a tentatively scheduled FaceTime call with Harry in a few minutes. At some point after that we will have our glorious Sunday dinner. Maybe some guitar playing after that. And then….

…and then… it’s Sunday so you know what that means. It happens 16 times a year and tonight will be the last one for a few months… a Fear the Walking Dead hate watch. 9:00pm. Be there or be… sane. Be there or don’t be a masochist. Be there or have actual good taste in television programs. Of course at 10:00pm we get the series finale of World Beyond. They told us right off the bat that it would only be two seasons and each season would be 10 episodes. Tonight is the 10th episode of season two. The end. Fortunately, despite a rather blah first season, the second half of the second season has been pretty much out of this world. Appointment viewing. I just wish it aired before Fear.

Okay. Harry’s calling. Talk to ya’ll later.

Hello Stress

As mentioned in the previous post, as well as a couple from last week, we are trying Hello Fresh again. Are you familiar with it? Every week they send us recipes and all of the ingredients for a couple of meals. All we have to do is follow the instructions and boom, fancy dinner for two. It’s kind of like culinary paint by numbers.

Except it tends to be really stressful. We’ve tried it in the past, as well as their main competitor Blue Apron, and generally trying to get all of the prep for each step done in time would raise our blood pressure by about 10000%. This time we’re taking it easier. If step one is prep, step two is cook, and step three is “while that’s cooking, prep again” we just do the two prep steps first. It takes longer to finish, but it’s easier on the heart.

Mostly.

There is also the little issue with the smoke alarms. I think in the last six meals we’ve done, we’ve set off the smoke alarms in the house four times. Four. Times. It’s gotten to the point where I turn on the exhaust fan and open all of the windows before I do anything else. It didn’t help tonight though. Frying up the chicken cutlets in the pan on the stove sure enough set those bastard alarms off once again. At least we know they work, right?

Speaking of the frying pan, the oil the chicken fried in splashed all over the kitchen. I’ve mopped the floor three times in the last two hours. Hopefully we don’t slip and fall. I would feel like a right asshole if that happened.

Still, despite all of that… the dinners we’ve made have been really good. Jen was a little down on one, but the rest have gone over really well.

Here’s hoping the trend continues. I think Jen is happy to not be eating chicken breasts and quinoa every night. Whatever makes my love happy.