Cooking day?

Ok, I will start this story from the beginning. Justin is in the fire program here in Salem (meaning he’s going to school A LOT and also working at the fire house). Once a term they have their turn to cook for their shift and the paid staff (total of 20 guys). Today is Justin’s turn.

Now, anyone that knows Justin knows he can’t do much of anything in moderation. He says he can, but he’s never proven it to me. Anything that he takes interest in is done to the fullest and the most extreme possible . . . sometimes to my annoyance (though annoying me is not hard to do). The other thing you have to understand about Justin’s personality or crazy people genes, is that he can stay up for several days in a row without sleep, and not in groggy mode either . . . fully functioning. Yeah, weird huh?! (His mom, the same way)

One other thing. Justin loves certain types of food . . . two of his favorites are anything seafood and Greek cuisine (not sure why I need to use the word ‘cuisine’ after Greek, but whatever . . . it sounds better). So for shift today he decided he wants to make a greek meal for the guys. Well, he decided this a week ago. So our plan, all week, was to tackle this feat yesterday (Saturday), his day off.

Friday night Justin comes in at midnight or so. I had done my nightly ritual of picking up the house and had plunked around on the ‘puter . . . I was getting very sleepy and ready for bed. He trounces into the bedroom with two big cookbooks under his arm and proceeds to discuss, excitedly, what he wants to make for Sunday’s shift. We had discussed this all week, but he had apparently come to a conclusion on all accounts and was ready to make his decisions known.

He had good choices, though it was hard peaking my interest as 12:30 in the morning. Moussaka for the main dish, Cheese Moon Pies for the bread/appetizer, Greek Salad and, for dessert he decided on Baklava. And, luckily, all these recipes were in his Greek cookbook.

Oh, but that wasn’t good enough. We had to cross-reference all recipes to ones we found on the internet . . . many times over. Just to make sure they were ‘authentic’ Greek recipes. AND lo and behold, they were all ‘authentic’ (well, as authentic as you can be living in Salem, Oregon and cooking Greek food).

We (or should I say ‘I’) got to bed at around 2-ish am. I was dead asleep, so I never saw, heard or even stirred at noise or movement, until the boys woke up. But apparently Justin proceeded to get sick about an hour later (blamed my beautiful and delicious Quiche I had made for dinner . . . though nobody else gotten sick from it) and threw up several times, seriously impeding what little sleep was left of the night (morning).

So, dragging himself out of bed at 11:30 am, still not feeling well and bit grouchy, he gets ready and leaves to purchase all ingredients for the above mentioned recipes . . . finally getting out of the house at noon ( way later than planned ). He is gone 4 hours . . . count with me . . . 1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 4 . . . 4 hours! Holy monkeys! Who takes 4 hours to go pick up about 100$ worth of groceries?!

He arrives home (eventually) and comes in with, at least, three different area grocery store bags full of stuff for the Greek meal of the year. He mutters something about how long it took him and he hates driving around for hours looking for everything. Hmmm, was it really that hard? . . . the ingredients weren’t that exotic. Anyway, kind of typical of J and I’ve gotten used to it.

Ok, my story is getting super long, so I’m going to try to wrap it up . . . though I might reference it for years to come.

Anyone that has kids knows that it is hard to concentrate on cooking, baking, talking on the phone, brushing your teeth . . . ok, just about anything that takes your attention off of them for any amount of time. So as soon as Samuel and Tobias honed in on the fact that, not just one of us, but BOTH of us were engrossed in food preparation and our attention was not focused on them . . . all toddler sanity left the house and we became targets for severe whining and obvious misbehaviors . . . misbehaviors that required us to stop what we were doing at the moment and correct them.

But, nothing was to stop this mission of perfection so onward we trudged . . . through leg-clingings (Sam’s favorite move) and projectile toys (Toby’s favorite).

…to be continued