I love the Food Network. It's clean (as in I can watch it in front of ages 0+ and not worry about content), I get ideas for amaze-sauce food, and, hey, it's entertaining! But then there's the preparation. Have you ever downloaded one of their recipes?
Let's take the Lobster Tail.
Prep time=20 minutes.
LIES.
I don't have clarified lemon butter, lobsters, skewers, a fire pit, and the coal from the kidney stone of a volcano demon lying around the house.
They should make a drop-down menu for situation-based prep time.
Single person who is prepared and lives in Hawaii: 20 minutes
Mom: 25 years
First is the time to get the kids in the car.
Half an hour to forty minutes, because we have to go potty, make a new potty chart, give a cookie reward, find the baby's/Cinderella's lost shoe AGAIN, retrieve hats, go back in for wipes, possibly a snack, flush the goldfish down the toilet that died in between cookie chart and lost shoes and hold a funeral--make sure to call priest and find out if they do last rites for goldfish-- complete with tissues made from toilet paper, leave at last, and then turn around again for the list because by the time I reach the store I will be distracted by the angered cries for free cookies from the cookie club.
Then the fifty hours IN the store trying to find the bizarre ingredients that are staples in Martha Stewart's home but no one else's and then the seventy hours IN the checkout with the inept bagger and the new cashier. How do I ALWAYS get the trainee? And I've been there, that new cashier, so I am very patient and kind, more so than the three year old who practically stares laser beams into anyone who addresses him with a smile.
Then we have to load the car.
Seventy hours after rebagging the two lobsters separately so they don't maim their precious tails that were 80 bucks a pop, we are ready to go.
Three days later we're home.
Walk in the door. And everyone screams for food, even the volcano demon. So I put some
minutes for sandwich time (short order cook pro here), cleanup time, likely bath time for baby and volcano demon,and then nap time. And by then a
week has passed, I have had a coffee (cold, not iced, just cold, and two weeks old), the lobster has taken up residence in the cereal cupboard and terrorizes the two year old who has named the lobster Fluffypants and tries to pet him.
Now it's time to find the necessary cooking devices that I got as a wedding present and never thought I'd use. There are some skewers at last (shaped like lightsabers) and, hey! a cupcake display. So now it's time to find a good cupcake recipe. Fluffypants helps to make the batter and the kids lick the bowl and the husband pouts because he didn't get to lick the beaters, but he was sleeping anyway. Then there's the time spent wondering how many times one can use the word "so" in a sentence while the two year old screams at you while you type a blog post instead of shoveling yogurt in her face and the five year old eats the cupcakes even though he was supposed to be arranging them on the display.
After a
month the volcano demon finally passes his charcoal kidney stone and I heat up the fire pit that I had the kids dig under the pretense that it would be a pool some day.
Cook Fluffypants.
Eat it while the two year old wails and the five year old cries that you ate and cooked their pet.
Remember that there was a
second lobster for your husband to eat and discover it beneath the slats of the three-year-old's car bed. Three-year-old and lobster, dubbed Captain Claw, have the same laser beam glare shooting into your head.
Leave Captain Claw as a pet.
Cook up some frozen chicken strips for your husband.
Three years later, do the dishes.
Twenty years later, let the grandkids dry said dishes.
When in a wheelchair, write a letter of complaint to the Food Network to amend their prep time. Pat Captain Claw on the eye-stalks as he putters around my lap.
Sounds about right, yes?
