End-of-the-Month Dinner

You know what that is. Don't lie.

It's the end of the month and you're broke. You've got a hungry family waiting on you to fix something mind-blowing (or maybe just edible) for dinner. You walk into your kitchen and are, quite frankly, appalled at the lack of healthy sustenance available. So, you scramble together what ingredients and pieces of meals you can find and hope to god it turns out okay. Sometimes, you get lucky. Sometimes, you find new and amazing ways to combine different foods for a GI-tract pleasing meal. Other times...not so much.

This is how my "end-of-the-month" dinner went two nights ago:

Thanks to my sweet mother, there was a pound of boneless, skinless chicken breasts in the refrigerator. "Awesome," I thought. "I've got some flour, some Crisco, milk and eggs. I can fry it!" Several hours pass, the Hubs gets home from work and it's time to start cooking. When I wander back into the kitchen and seriously think about frying the chicken, my conviction pales. I am going to get flour all over everything. I am going to have more dishes to wash afterward. That's not happening. "Alright, alright. I can just bake it. That's healthier anyway."

Now, to find some sides.

Check the cabinets: more cans of beans than I want to admit, no-boil lasagna noodles, Gerber Graduate snacks for the boy, muffin mix, tea. "Hm. No biggie. I'll just check the freezer."

Freezer: popsicles, waffles, more popsicles, a mostly empty bag of Pillsbury biscuits, half empty bag of frozen corn and a partially empty bag of carrots. "Biscuits always go great with chicken." Turn the oven on to pre-heat for the biscuits. Check.

Once I've assembled the desired seasonings for the chicken from the Hubs (I think I'll start calling him "Flavor Master." That's kinda sexy.), I season the chicken and then go back into the freezer to grab the corn. When I open the bag and look inside, though, I see the corn is over a year old and, even though its been in the freezer and should still be good, it clearly isn't. Slightly disappointed (I really love corn), I toss it and go back for the carrots.

These carrots were so old and so freezer-burned that there was absolutely no way to save them. Ever. Dejected, I toss them, too. A meal just isn't complete without some sort of color, in my opinion, so I open the fridge in desperation.

Applesauce.

"Better than nothing, and at least it's good for you!" I figured.

By this time, the biscuits are done cooking. Apparently, the biscuits weren't good anymore, either, because they were...grey. A rather nasty shade of grey. (No Fifty Shades of Grey looks good on biscuits...trust me.) There were biscuit icicles coming off the sides, too. I didn't take a picture (for some reason) so I can't show you what biscuit icicles really look like, but trust me when I say that they are completely unappetizing. Even the Hubs didn't want to touch the biscuits - and that right there says more than anything else.

But you know what? Despite all of the fail of dinner, that chicken was delicious.

And at least we had applesauce.

And leftover wedding-shower cake (congrats to my sister and her fiancee, by the way).

Mmm. Cake.

-Mommy Michelle

True story.

(In a totally unrelated note, I tried to make my own biscuits from scratch last night...without self-rising flour...or baking soda. Let me tell you what, I thought they would still be alright - just flat. I can handle flat biscuits. I love bread in just about any form. I wasn't banking on biscuits so hard I could knock them against the wall without hurting the biscuit. Just don't do it. Learn from my baking fails.)