In my career as a wife and mother, in the fifty years that I made the evening meal for my family, the math comes out to 18,250 or so dinners that I cooked. During that time, there were of course some disasters, but the majority of the time, the things I made were completely acceptable, and quite a few were delicious. I could make recipes, follow directions, and even improvise. My family not once refused to eat what I cooked.
I have never liked cooking. No Julia, Ina, or Emeril over here. I just did what had to be done, and I managed pretty well. My kids still say that I “make the best tuna and egg salad ever.” So there is some pride involved with that.
However, when we moved into our apartment, my skills slowly deteriorated. We subscribed to meal boxes, and my husband took over cooking those. That left four nights a week for suppers I was responsible for.
I hated those four nights, and spent time online looking for “easy recipes for two,” and really leaned into the Crockpot. As many of you have experienced, Crockpot meals most often taste as if the cook just boiled a bunch of stuff and then served it.
Things got progressively worse. Sandwiches were frequent. I had high hopes for omelettes, but my spouse refuses to eat breakfast for dinner. I overdid spaghetti and Rao’s sauce. I continued to look for “easy recipes.”
I undercooked things, misread recipes, added herbs and spices that did not enhance the entrees, and tried to convince my husband that a lot of families have the same thing on the same night every week. I had hopes that I could get away with “Sandwich Sundays and a “Midweek Pot Pie.” That didn’t go down. He wanted variety. My dinners got worse and worse.
So. Last Friday, I thought I would make pizza. Easy. We have a pizza stone. You buy the dough ready made, and nobody cares if you stretch the pizzas perfectly round. Then, you preheat the oven to 450 or 475 with the pizza stone in there. Just throw on the toppings and cook. Easy peasy.
I have one of those pizza shovel things. I put cornmeal on the shovel, as that is imperative in order for the pizza to slide off onto the pizza stone without getting stuck on the shovel. “Smart,” I thought to myself.
I hit the 475 degree button, oven on, and sat down to talk to my husband during the pre-heating. The oven beeped. I had forgotten to hit “start.” So I got up and hit “start,” not realizing that when I did that, the oven reset to the standard 350 degrees. Not hot enough for the pizza.
I spread half of the dough (“makes two pizzas) on the shovel and topped with the sauce, the olives, etc., finishing up with lots of mozzarella. It slid right onto the pizza stone. In the not hot enough oven.
I did the same thing all over again on the shovel. Then it hit me: I needed the shovel to get the first pizza off the stone and onto the counter.
I remembered, somewhere in the depths of my brain, reading instructions that said “You can put the pizza directly onto the oven rack,” so I did that with pizza number two, on the rack above the one on the pizza stone. Sat down and relaxed.
Suddenly, my husband screamed,”Molly! THE PIZZA ON THE RACK IS MELTING DOWN ONTO THE PIZZA BELOW! IT’S DRIBBLING ALL DOWN!”
And sure enough, what I had remembered was instructions for store bought frozen pizzas, which as we all know, have crusts made out of dough that contains 90% cardboard. They don’t melt.
I tried to retrieve the bottom pizza, but as the oven was set to just the 350 degrees, that pizza was melty on top but raw otherwise-it sagged. It buckled. It became all scrunched up, because it was under cooked. Ugh. THEN, As we struggled to grab the globs of pizza hanging off the oven rack above, like stalactites, he burned his hand and said the “F” word, I became depressed, and we ordered pizza delivery.
After we had the really good delivery pizza, my husband looked at me, shook his head, and said, “You know Molly, I think your cooking days are over.”
I rejoiced silently. Then I rejoiced right out loud.
