What I Made for Dinner: August 31, 2009

Marinated chicken and caramelized onions, cucumber-mint salad with yogurt dressing, hummus with pita bread.

I am trying this Everyday Food "Sunday Strategy" plan, wherein the magazine tells you exactly what to buy and what to do with it all for a week of dinners, including some advance prep work on Sunday night. So far, so good: last night, my "Sunday Strategy" required me to marinate the chicken in olive oil and lemon juice (check!), roast fourteen halved tomatoes for later, make some sauce, and boil some potatoes (check check!).

I bought into this idea because its advance planning and organization seems to promise serenity, a week of stress-free dinners prepared without breaking a sweat. Let's see how it goes, hmm?

So tonight I cooked the chicken with onions and made the salad, which went fine (and was all very tasty, as it turned out).

But: The jar of hummus in the fridge, upon which I was counting, was beset by furry turquoise space aliens. Or perhaps mold. Either way, while the chicken was cooking I had to make the hummus from scratch. Which is absolutely no big deal, hummus only has like four ingredients, no problem, only Eli got really hungry in the middle of all this and needed a peanut butter sandwich, which he then demanded I feed to him because he does not like to touch it, and Alex decided to whittle down a box of crayons to doll size for some kind of school project, covering the kitchen table with all manner of wax shavings and teensy bits of Crayola paper, and Josh needed me to go over his spelling list with him.

Anyway, the Sunday Strategy didn't make my meal preparation tonight any less chaotic. But I can hardly blame that on the editors of Everyday Food, now can I?

There is no Monday strategy.