I'm always harping on hubby to make sure we have balanced meals, with a vegetable every night.  So when I have to cook, I try to live by what I nag.  During the week, its a little less on the fresh food and more of the taco kit out of a box variety (and mac and cheese, and pizza), but today I decided to make dinner using all the fresh things I bought at the market.  Nothing elaborate, I thought.  Fry up the pork, boil up the green beans, and nuke the Minute rice.  Easy peasy!

Ha hah.

I have NEVER been able to properly time my cooking.  I always feel like I'm scrambling to get everything on the table at the same time without going cold.  First mistake I made was deciding to add fresh basil to the bread crumbs.  How the HELL do you chop up basil?  I always end up with huge chunks of basil leaves rather than nice little minced pieces.  So that took forever.  Then I had to bread the pork, after running it under hot water to defrost the darn thing because I didn't take it out early enough.  While I was running the water, I quickly quickly went through the green beans and snapped off the ends and threw them in the boiling pot of water that I at least had the brains to turn on before I started chopping the basil.  Then while the pork was in the pan, I threw the rice in the nuker.  Then turned back to the pork, which wasn't cooking right, and everytime I turned the pork all the breading would stick to the pan, thereby NEGATING all the damn chopping and dipping I did in the FIRST PLACE!!! Grrrr.  This, too, always happens to me.  Finally cooked the pork, the rice is still cooking, and the beans are certainly overdone at this point.

I then scramble to set the stupid table for two of us, since DH isn't up for solid foods yet.  I had to make fourteen trips back and forth before I remembered everything that needed to be on the table.  DD decided she had to have the muffins we had made earlier today with her dinner.  So after all this scrambling, my DD finished her muffin and left half her pork and green beans and rice on her plate.  Ah, the payoff of parenting!

My kitchen was quite the sight.  In order to make this meal, I used one frying pan, one pot, three shallow bowls for the breading process (THREE!!!), tupperware to nuke the rice, a chopping board for the basil, a spoon, three knives, two forks.  There was flour and basil and egg shells all over my counter and my floor.  Then I need two bowls, three plates, two cups, two sets of silverware to serve the meal.  So, I sat there, at the dinner table, just dreading the cleaning up that faced me after this meal.  Even I, the slob that I am, could not let the kitchen sit like that.  The thought of getting all the dishes in the dishwasher (after unloading it from this morning), cleaning the counters and the floor, and putting away all the leftovers made me want to cry.

Then, I remembered the article I read earlier today:

Africa's Last and Least

Boy, talk about a sudden dose of perspective.  I should be goddamn grateful about every aspect of the meal sitting on my table.  That I can afford to feed my ONE child with more than enough food to keep her from being hungry at night.  That I don't have to get up every day at 4:30 am to earn a lousy $10 a month.  That I don't have to hold food back from the older children so I feed the littler ones later.  And that, finally, I get to eat my fill three times a day plus snacking.  I have no idea of how badly life can suck.  NO IDEA AT ALL.  I immediately stopped internally whining.  The kitchen got cleaned, and the dishes are put away.  The leftovers are in the fridge, waiting to be turned into lunch during the week.  And I blithely threw away the box of Minute Rice with about a half a cup of rice still in it, because it wasn't enough to bother making.  HELLO?  How lucky am I??

I really want to hold onto to this perspective, because it would obviously make me a happier person overall.  Less likely to wallow in self-pity, more likely to remember to be grateful.  That would be nice.  Because, yes, making dinner is hard, but it could be a whole hell of a lot harder.