Yeah, that was dinner. It was good, bad, and embarrassing.
Here’s what happened: My dashing husband is out of town. I had a meeting at my house that we scheduled for a late lunch so I could experiment on the other attendees (they were very nice about it) and make them taste/eat a recipe I was developing for a high-paying recipe contest* which I was going to enter because, as you may have noticed, the economy appears to be in the tank and freelance work is sparse and some people and even large corporations seem to think it is okay to not pay people for work done… but I digress. I wanted to post a “how to make homemade potato chips” over at Local Foods in time for the Superbowl because, I’ve been told, people are always looking for “fun” ways to entertain at their Superbowl parties (no, I don’t really understand any of that sentence either). So, I made potato chips for us to snack on, among other delicacies. And the meeting was going okay. Not great, but okay. One person couldn’t show because of injuries sustained while hiking, another showed despite being in the process of recovering from food poisoning and was thus unable to really, you know, help eat all the food. And then, just as we were getting down to the business at hand and making some progress on our joint projects, the phone rang (or rather the call waiting beeped through on the speaker phone on which we were talking to our injured participant) and it was Ernest’s school. “Hi Molly,” the friendly voice said, “this is [the school secretary]. Ernest threw up.”
I thanked her for calling, hung up, drove to school, picked up the saddest looking boy I’ve ever seen, got him home, put him in the bath, and gave the rest of the meeting the old college try but was, as you might imagine, pretty distracted.
So, after the meeting ended, and after I cleaned the kitchen, and after I wrote up my notes from the recipes I worked on, and after I got him into bed early with “no dinner, Mama, no dinner,” and I finally headed down to eat my own dinner… well, that bowl of potato chips looked really good. And so I ate them. All that were left. I put extra smoked salt on them and crunched my way through the whole bowl and the batches draining on the cooling rack too and didn’t have a salad or yogurt or anything to try and pretend that I didn’t just eat a bowl of potato chips for dinner.
And that, my dear internets, is why I don’t keep potato chips in the house. I am powerless before their salty crispness!
* Um, this in also embarrassing: When I went to enter the recipe in the contest I realized I am ineligible. Because, clever as I am I don’t think I could convince someone that I’m not a “professional food writer” what with getting paid every now and again to write about food and being so billed in more than one easily accessed internet site. Great. I guess I should just go buy lottery tickets and call it a day.
Kate | 26-Jan-09 at 3:22 pm | Permalink
That actually sounds really good. Somehow, I wish I could have that for dinner this very evening.