This is the biggest flop that I have had in my kitchen for a while. If you will oblige I can explain.

The house was chaos, pure chaos. My two year old son was running circles through out the entire space of the house hollering at the top of his lungs. Behind him followed two over sized dogs, knocking things over as they trampled in excited pursuit. This was the first disaster as I was trying to prepare dinner: Mommy, the dogs spilled my milk.

No problem. I stopped and cleaned it up. I was already a bit on edge, a bit frazzled just from the day in general and for some reason dinner time preparation takes that slightly frazzled me and can turn me into a crazed maniac.

I went back to cooking. My husband was going to be late, he just called to let me know. This messed up the timing of dinner.

After a few deep breaths and relaxing to the sounds of Sarah Groves music in my kitchen I returned to the meal.

“Oh no!” In cleaning up the milk, finding a good activity for my son, corralling the dogs, and talking on the phone I let the beans burn to the bottom of the pan.

The smoke alarm went off sending me through the roof and giving a similar reaction to the rest of the household.

This meal was going to be salvaged. I was not giving up. I scrapped the unburned beans from the top of the pan and set them aside.

Now, to the artichoke. I try to do fresh food whenever possible. I do not like to buy canned food due to the chemicals released into the food from the can. I bought a fresh artichoke and thought that this was what I needed for the meal.

NO. I did not need AN artichoke, I needed lots of artichoke hearts. From this one beautiful artichoke came ONE tiny little “heart” for the meal. No problem. I would use the one little artichoke heart and improvise.

So, now the grand meal has been reduced to noodles with burned beans and ONE artichoke heart flavoring it.

I still was not giving up.

Enter the kitchen a crying two year old, sobbing actually.
“Momma, I go pee pee.”
Standing in the kitchen is a wet spot. He peed on the floor. To make matters worse before I could even respond the dogs run through the kitchen, right through the pee and track it all over the place.

I scooped up my son and we went upstairs to clean him up.

Now, here is where thing get really crazy. Here is where my meal plan for the night really falls apart…..

When I came back down it dawned on me that I left the beans and the measly artichoke heart on the counter. But, where was it?

The sounds of dogs licking their chops resonated in my ears. In my brief absence the dogs, totally unlike them, put their paws up on the counter and ATE our meal.

We were left with one pot of overcooked Fettuccine noodles.

The tears welled up in my eyes just as my husband walked into the door and said, “Hi Honey, are you burning something?”

So, I can not report to you how this meal tasted but the dogs like it. They eat poo though so I would not take their opinion with much weight.

What did I do? How did I save the moment?

I ALWAYS have tupperware of home made frozen marinara sauce in my freezer. When I am running low I make a huge batch and restock.

I wiped my tears away, asked my hubby to take the dogs outside, put my son in the playroom with his willing father and microwaved some sauce.

I threw the sauce over the noodles and we had a meal.

I hope my little story of meal planning/preparation gone seriously awry makes you smile.

ps…I do think that the artichoke is a really beautiful vegetable. Look at the picture above. I could have used artichokes as my wedding bouquet and saved a lot of money. Hehehe….