I am cursed, my friends. it is the curse of... the taco. (No, not THAT one, a different one.) So on my birthday, I had a humble celebratory meal planned. I was going to make tacos and blueberry pie. (They tacos had actually been on the menu plan since Sunday, I'd just not yet managed to make them because we didn't have any cheddar and I'm not with it enough to thaw out ground beef.)
That particular Thursday, though, turned out to be a hair-raising day of seeking a new medical attendant to deliver my baby, which in case you are not aware is no easy feat when you are in your third trimester. The highlights include my speaking to a medical practitioner who in 15 short minutes managed to call me fat and tell me that, well, the best thing for me to do would be get better health insurance. My reaction: "Oh yeah? Bite me."
Dinnertime rolled around, and I was wiped out by anxiety and fatigue from being on the phone so much, so we brought in dinner from the local Italian place. Friday turned out to be a horrifying repeat of Thursday except nobody called me fat this time, and beyond that, I never managed to thaw out the ground beef, so no tacos. That was leftover night for us.
On weekends, we typically don't eat formal dinners; we eat sizeable lunches during our errands, and then scrounge up fruit or cereal or sandwiches for dinner. So it was this weekend.
Monday, though, MONDAY, I decided, would be the day. I still had never thawed out any variety of ground meat for tacoing purposes, so at the end of the day, small girl in tow, I went to the grocery store to BUY fresh, not-previously-frozen ground beef. This was a major tactical error.
The girl, she was not good. Worse, the girl, she was not quiet. Not for a single second. While this may sound harmless on the surface, you must trust me when I tell you that it just is not. By the time we got home and had the groceries put away, my uterus had begun to express its displeasure for the heat, the standing in line, and the simmering irritability brought on by the Naughty Child. It was determined by all that I probably need to sit down for a while rather than standing and cooking.
So today. Today, I relaxed my standards a bit. I began making a blueberry cobbler, rather than a pie. This was ill-omened from the start. The first time, I mixed up measurements and had to throw the batter out, but the second try seemed to go OKish. Then I started to cook the ground beef for tacos; Matt took over the browning thereof and let me outside to blow bubbles for Sasha for a few minutes.
When we came back in, I was assailed with the aroma of kind-of-off meat. Sasha added her own "Ew, what's that smell?" Matt, who had been thinking the same thing but discounting his own senses, chimed in regarding the subjective rancidity of the aroma of the taco meat. You know, the stuff I bought yesterday? The stuff that there was just no way we were going to try to eat, what with the fragrance of painful bacterial intestinal retribution perfuming my kitchen?
Fate, I have gotten your message. I have given up on making tacos. Matt, bless his heart, went out to Taco Bell for me.
And while the cosmos seems to have some sort of big problem with my plan to make tacos for dinner, I yet have all of these ingredients. So tell me, what else can one make with taco shells, tomatoes, shredded cheddar, and sour cream, if not tacos?
My kitchen is: Smelling of blueberry cobbler of yet-unknown quality and flavor. I will admit to some significant fear on this count. I'm sure you're all quite sympathetic.
We all remember Sasha's pesky dairy allergy, right? Too much milk or cheese or yogurt and her cheeks turn red and she breaks out in mystery hives? You know, the one that didn't actually show up on a CAP-RAST test in spite of its painful obviousness when she, oh, you know, had too much yogurt?
Well. We think that just might be all done.
I came to realise over the past few weeks that we haven't seen the milk-related red cheeks out of her in a long, long time, and so over the past few days we've been letting her amp up the amount of real cow dairy she gets in a day. She's been drinking Danimals and eating string cheese and then having real cow milk with dinner all on the same day! Mac and cheese with an ice cream chaser? No problem! And so far, so good. No red cheeks, no hives, no mysterious stomach upsets.
At her four-year check-up, the pediatrician observed that she seems to be growing healthier and healthier as she gets bigger. And you know, some days, I can even believe it.
My kitchen is: Eh, easy come, easy go. It's really quite clean, I just really need to cycle the dishwasher and get rid of the dirty dishes on the counter.