My parents are currently in Zambia, visiting my sister,
Kristi, who moved there as a missionary nurse. So, that leaves me home. Alone. Cooking. Which, you might have heard, is a rather deadly combination.
This evening for dinner, I decided to try something outside my usual list of spaghetti, cereal, and chocolate. It’s called peanut butter sauce, it goes on rice, it’s from Africa, and I even had the recipe.
How hard could it be?
First, I needed hamburger. Hm. A thorough search of all three freezers revealed not a scrap of hamburger in the house. I considered switching the menu to chicken strips, but peanut butter sauce sounded really good. Solution? Mystery Meat. Not quite sure what it was, but I bravely hauled it up from the basement, frozen solid in a ziplock bag.
Which was another problem. I only wanted about a quarter of the Mystery Meat. And it was frozen solid. Have you ever tried to extract a quarter slice of stone-cold meat from plastic?
I tried running it under water for a while, but that wasn’t working fast enough. I tried sawing it apart with the bread knife. Apparently, bread knives weren’t made for sawing. I looked for an ice pick, but it had run off with the hamburger. And that is when I lit on brilliance.
I do that sometimes.
Marching to the toolbox, I pulled out a screwdriver and a hammer. Really, I did. I wedged the screwdriver into the frozen meat - praying there were no bones and that I’d be able to actually pull it back out again - and started hammering away. A couple minutes later - Voilà! One chunk of Mystery Meat ready to go.
Putting my Mystery Meat on to “brown” (finally! - a word I understand!), I moved on with the recipe. One small onion, a cup of peanut butter sauce, a tomato. Well, the recipe didn’t call for a tomato
exactly, but I couldn’t find any tomato sauce, and I wasn’t sure what tomato paste was, so I used a frozen tomato instead. Quite proud of myself for finding ingredients that were at least the right color, I put it all on to simmer.
Which is when I noticed the bat in the living room . . .
(Oh, yeah, they're real cute when they're dive-bombing your head.)
So, there I was, blanket held up like a shield in one hand, broom in the other (think jousting knight), trying to convince this infernal creature it was in his best interest to fly out the open door I was swatting him towards. While the peanut butter sauce faithfully simmered, and the rice boiled over on the stove . . .
Twenty minutes later, the stove top was a little blacker, and the bat was back outside where it belonged. There may be some extra indoor moths when you come home, Mom and Dad. But there won’t be any bats.
