Sometimes It All Falls Apart and That’s OK

I had a good day by all accounts. I got some work done. I felt good about the work. Our country welcomed in a new administration with no major incidents, something that has been worrying me for a while. That administration made some policy moves that I welcome. Everything was going just fine. Then I started cooking.

Cooking is my refuge. How could it possibly betray me? Well, some days, we all just fall apart. I don’t know if it’s part of a hangover from the last four years, or at least this last year…I just know that nothing went right and the simplest of meals almost had me in tears on the floor. And I’m just going to accept that and move on to tomorrow.

It all started with slightly botched cookies. I think they’ll turn out fine, but they definitely did not come out as they usually do. I decided to make No Bake Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies because I was done with what work I could do today, and it was too early to make dinner. Well, first, I ran out of parchment paper. Okay, so I got out some baking sheets to drop them on. Then, I was impatient and did not boil my chocolate mixture long enough. So, the cookies spread more than I prefer and are taking longer to harden. This meant I had cookies all over my limited counter space when it was time to start dinner.

I decided to try a new method for grilled cheese sandwiches where you just assemble them and put them in the oven. Unfortunately, when the first timer went off to flip them, I couldn’t get it to shut up and accidentally turned the oven off in frustration. I ended up having to finish the sandwiches stovetop anyway because I didn’t figure this out. I won’t go into detail, but there was also a slight tantrum when I couldn’t find a single clean spatula to flip them. I mean, there were maybe 10 dirty dishes in the dishwasher and three of them were my spatulas. How does that even happen?

Then there was the soup. I made tomato-basil soup to go with our sandwiches. Everything was fine except the damned immersion blender. I don’t have a single available outlet near my stove. So I have to haul the stuff to the other side of the kitchen and use the blender and then haul it back to the stove to finish. Okay, that’s not a huge deal, just annoying. But with cookies taking up half my counter and our coffee “station” (this is in quotes because it’s really just a damned disaster area where coffee is made.) taking up another third, I had very limited space. And I swear you need a 12 inch deep pan to use that immersion blender or you’re going to wear whatever your blending. In the end, I still had some chunks of tomato in the soup.

All this occurred while also taking a panicked client call and a consult call from a colleague in my field. Needless to say, I was pretty frazzled by the time we sat down to dinner. But I held it together and nobody complained about the food. It was actually pretty tasty in the end despite all the frustrations. And the cookies are in the fridge, hopefully setting up. If they don’t, I’ll just eat them with a spoon. Yep, sometimes things fall apart and you just eat them anyway.