The Happy Homemaker

I did not intend for this to be a confessional, where I bare to the world (or, you know, no one at all) my many foibles. Even so… I am a scheme hatcher, and am always coming up with plans (or the concept behind the plans) and systems (that go unimplemented) for tackling life’s various requirements, mostly in the domestic arena. One of the habits I am trying to build into our household is cooking dinner at home, regularly, easily, nutritiously, whatever. I know, this is not exactly an unusual one. Recently I came up with a kind of dial a dinner plan that involved brainstorming dinners that we are fairly proficient at preparing, figuring out what ingredients I would need to shop for at the beginning of the week, and so forth.

Naturally, the plan has languished. Not to say we’re not cooking at home, just to say, well, we’re not exactly making it on one grocery trip a week. And takeout continues to be taken out. But yesterday after work, in a burst of ambitious good feeling brought on by the warm sunshine, I made a list and ran to the grocery store on the way home. Part of the framework of my original plan involved scheduling dishes to take advantage of whatever ingredients I bought that week, and since I wanted tacos yesterday, I knew I could use half the ground turkey on the tacos (turkos), and half for lasagna. AND, I could actually make the lasagna ahead of time. So that’s where I was, last night, after the youngster had finally been put to bed, browning the rest of the turkey, mixing up the ricotta, and halving the recipe on the no-bake noodle box. This was harder than it sounds, because the recipe made it seem like I was going to have a certain number of layers, so I fractioned the ingredients accordingly, and when I found myself with one fewer layer of noodles to work with, I had to just glob the extra layer of cheesy stuff on an already existing cheesy stuff layer. And from this description, isn’t it something that no one has offered me my own cooking show, as of this writing? So, noodles on top, lots of sauce (since I didn’t bother to halve the jar sauce), cheese, foil, fridge. Ta daa! I made Tuesday’s dinner on Monday night. I had arrived. Just as I closed the refrigerator door, I looked over at the stove, where I saw a nice big skillet of…browned turkey.

Fortunately, Jim was there to help. Actually, he came running when he heard me say one of the words I recently and with some struggle gave up saying on account of one big-eared little pitcher. He thought I had cut my finger off. We got the lasagna out of the fridge, lifted off the top layer of no-bake noodles (preserving most of the cheese), and dumped the turkey into the already burgeoning top double layer. Replace noodles, replace foil, replace in fridge.

Tonight, top-heavy lasagna. I will let you know how it comes out.