Desperation Dinner at the Dickinson's

by

Patti Dickinson

I made a new recipe last night for dinner.  My dinner menus range from Weight Watchers cookbook recipes to what I call Desperation Dinners.  This was the latter.  Prep time in under ten minutes.  That's including slicing and dicing time, and time to find a realistic substitute for the ingredients I don't have and don't have time to run to the grocery store for. 

But hold on, this story is going to take a few detours in the telling.  So the chicken breasts are on the stove, two at a time, browning in 3 T of butter and 3 T of olive oil.  Nice sizzle sound as background noise.  I decide to multi-task and answer a quick email or two.  Then I hear an unfamiliar sound.  A decided cracking noise, and it's coming from the front right burner.  The glass, made for stove-to-oven use has cracked in two.  Fortunately the lid was on, holding the two cracked pieces together.  The bad news was that the olive oil/butter combination was flooding the burner and pouring over the open flame.  Visions of Fire Department personnel enormous hoses in tow....I am trying to decide which powdery substance to throw on the roaring fire that isn't the "medium" flame I had it set on.  My high school freshman comes out into the kitchen, coinciding with a Jon and Kate Plus Eight commercial. She sees the flames and we go into synchronized action.  I get a cookie sheet to put the broken pot on. She turns off the gas (hmmm, now why didn't I think of that?) and the panic is knocked back a few notches. Lots of smoke in the kitchen.....lots of it.  We open some doors/windows, light the scented candle (an exercise in futility, we would have needed all the candles in St. Patrick's Cathedral to kill the something-horrible-happened-in-the-cooking-of-this-dinner smell) and begin to let relief take over.  

My husband came home....sniffs and says, "What happened?"  "Nothing much, just grilling a little chicken."  Above-mentioned daughter tells the whole story at the dinner table, adding her own spin to the drama.

So I say, "What's everyone think of this chicken recipe?  A keeper?"  My husband pipes up and says, "It's not bad."  He means this as a compliment, not it-stops-just-shy-of-activating-my-gag-reflex.  

This isn't the first drama I've had cooking dinner.  And it likely won't be the last.  But my Girl Scout troop would have said that I make a mean dump cake on the open flame.  Hmmm...open flame......