Fred Turns Up The Heat.

I can be a terribly jealous little girl. Or is it envious? Those words are like the Kardashians. I can never tell them apart, they're emotionally draining and I often wonder why they exist.

So. Yeah. I'm jealous (or envious)(or both) of a lot of people. Skinny moms. Independently wealthies. Anyone born in the mid-eighties. Meryl Streep. And lately, I've been jealous of my dear beloved Fred. Because he has done something I thought impossible.

He's surpassed me in the kitchen. This is bad.

It began with Apple Chicken with Cous-Cous, a simple Family Circle recipe. He made it and it was a testament to mixing fruit with meat, something I'm not always sold on. Rich but not overly heavy, with salty, fatty chicken thighs to cut through the sweetness of the apple glaze. It was so good, in fact, I decided to make it for my mom when she visited.

Unlike Fred, I'm not one for following a recipe exactly. I'm a seasoned home cook, after all. I mean, it's cute and all, the way Fred measures out things. But I'm a maverick. A brilliant scientist. A dare devil!

A moron.

By throwing caution to the wind and not following the recipe, I ended up throwing out about a pound of undercooked chicken thighs. My sauce was overly sweet. The cous cous was dry and the spinach didn't wilt.

How did this happen? This is a guy who owned ONE POT before we got married and we put (I snuck) lots of lovely All-Clad on our Williams Sonoma registry. Maybe his body chemistry is stimulated by a $205 saute pan or something.

Then I had a glimmer of hope. One morning Fred announces he's going to try a stuffed chicken breast recipe. Finally! I think. A chance for him to fail! Stuffed chicken breasts are almost legally required to be dry, tasteless, and leave a shard of toothpick stuck to the roof of your mouth. He's so gonna bomb on this one.

Wrong again.


The dinner was beautiful. The chicken was juicy and the stuffing creamy. Almonds gave a perfect crunch to the texture. He steamed some fresh, crunchy green beans and made a side of buttered basmati rice with peas. I secured my Black Card membership in the Clean Plate Club. And left the table with that little green monster nipping at my psyche.

My jealousy is compounded by the fact that I've cooked up a lot of misses lately. There was this Squash Au Gratin that sounded amazing, but I didn't feel the need to use real cream in it so we ended up with a dry squash casserole. Then there was a "chili" I made with our leftover ham hock from Easter, one I decided to improvise and therefore, ended up with a watery bean soup.

I'm starting to think I should try Fred's little "following the recipe" tactic.

Even a maverick needs a little direction, right?

If you're so inclined, you can find the recipe for Stuffed Chicken with Almonds here.
Yes, it's a Cooking Light recipe.
Yes, we've had a lot of luck with Cooking Light lately.
No, I don't think it's just because of Fred.

Grandma's Lemon Cake

Every Easter, my grandma made her "famous" lemon cake. It's comprised mostly of premade mixes and it's incredibly delicious. Fred couldn't stop himself from going back for more and more.

My grandma passed away earlier this year after having lived a long, accomplished life that included 5 children, 13 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren. I would make some sort of metaphoric comparison between Grandma and the cake, using words like "uncomplicated" and "tart and sweet at the same time", but I'd rather not make her roll her eyes in heaven.

This Easter, my mom made the cake. This is what I love about family favorites. Grandma Scally may not have been physically present this Easter, but she was still at our table.


Agnes Rohe Scally's Lemon Cake

For Cake
1 Box of Lemon Cake Mix
1 Box of Instant Lemon Pudding

For Glaze
1 cup of confectioner's sugar
1 TBL milk
1 lemon, juiced

EQUIPMENT: 1 bundt cake pan, wire cooling rack

Directions
Make cake according to package directions for a bundt cake, mixing in the box of lemon pudding. Pour into a bundt pan. Once it's done baking and completely cooled, make the glaze. Simply mix the glaze ingredients together and drizzle over cake.

Listless

Does Madonna have a list of Life Dreams? Somehow I think not.

On the left hand side of her site, Maggie Mason has a list of things she'd like to do in her lifetime. It's a great list. I happen to think she is one of the coolest people on the Internet, so I decided to follow her example.

Huh.

Maggie's list sounds worldly and aspirational. Mine sounded like a list of errands I need to get to before work on Monday.

I kid you not when I tell you that one of my things was, "Get to Target to use gift certificate for Easter candy." and "Buy Walt a pail and shovel for the playground sandbox." And those are the least pathetic ones.

As a reasonably intelligent woman, I was shocked by what I had written. I've seen Maggie's list, I get the gist. And yet. I couldn't seem to think up a single thing that didn't involve Walt.

TRAPPED! I'm clamped between the iron jaws of the Mommy Martyrdom. You know, that totally played-out thing about always putting everyone else's needs before mine. And feeling excruciatingly guilty for wanting to have a few nonworking hours away from my family.

Because like many women I know, I received a message that said, "Good, caring mommies focus on their children at all times. Otherwise your depressed kids will grow up to be enraged serial killers. Or Morrissey."

It's not about being a perfect mom anymore. No one thinks you have to be that. There are a gillion books, even more blogs and a TV show that celebrate drinking wine during nap time and letting your kid go to school with Twinkies for lunch. It's more about how much time you spend away from your kids, and is that really good for them?

This message is entangled deeply with my DNA. Even Oprah can't talk it away, and this woman had me buying argyle sweaters one autumn. (Don't ask.) I hear it murmuring quiet disagreement when I read anything that says "Me" time. (An annoying phrase for a bevy of reasons that will take another post to tackle. ) It's tsk-tsking when I hear of parents who left their 8-month-old with gramma and went scuba diving for a week. It's clenching by stomach and twisting when I go to my musical improv class Thursday nights, meaning the only time I see Walt that one day is for a few hours in the morning before work.

What a shit message, right? I try to pretend it doesn't exist. But oh! There it is, lurking and ruining my scheudled pedicure, conniving to throw me into a guilt-fueled buying spree at Toys R Us. What's a girl who wants to think up a few lifetime dreams to do?

The only solution I can come up with is to ignore it and keep moving. In AA they encourage newcomers who are trying to stop drinking to "act as if..." you want to be a recovering alcoholic, even when every cell in your body cries for 27 vodka rocks. Eventually the feeling will fade. So that's what I'm going to do. Act as if I don't feel guilty, or like I suck, or like Walt's very future is going to shatter like weak plaster if I don't see him for 2 hours on one night.

Because if there's one thing I truly believe, it's that there is no better gift I can give Walt then a mom who is truly well-rounded and fulfilled. That, and an Elmo pail.