Today was yet another example that I am my mother's daughter. The drive to cook humongous amounts of food is apparently in my blood.
The difference between Mom's situation and mine, however, is that she had a very large family to feed all the food to. I don't. I now have several examples of wanting to feed my family of four and accidentally succeeding in preparing for a family of eight. Or 12.
One example happened on New Year's Day this year. My mom always prepared a particular ethnic dish traditional to our family on January 1st, and this year I thought I'd pick up the baton and continue the tradition with my boys. The dish is a doughnut-like batter with raisins in it that gets fried into fluffy, golden-brown dumplings and then coated in sugar. (Yum.) Looking through my mom's recipes, I soon discovered she had about four different sizes of the recipe written down, and I wasn't sure which one to choose (she neglected to write down "Serves X number"). So I picked a size in the middle and went for it.
The fact that the size I was using called for 12 eggs should have tipped me off.
An hour later, I was still frying, and I had to make an emergency call to the neighbors across the street to help us eat them.
A more recent example is my purchase of 60 pounds of strawberries, because surely a mere 20 pounds couldn't make enough jam to feed my family. I had to be rescued by a friend to help me get through the large task of processing them. It was a sticky six hours, but I think we have enough jam now.
Now, as we speak, I am lying down recovering from tonight's bout of Monster Meal Madness.
It all started two days ago when I went into a grocery store I don't usually shop at, and saw that artichokes were on a good sale. Oh, what a treat! I thought. I'll get four. So far, so good. Four family members, four artichokes. (Never mind that two of them are children who may or may not eat any artichoke, let alone a whole one apiece. Just a minor consideration.)
Then I wandered over to the meat section and discovered a sale on pork chops. Hey, that would be fun! We could have a nice meal of pork chops and steamed artichokes. I wonder how to cook pork chops. I've never made them before. I'll find a recipe online! Naturally, the sale was on the "Max Packs" of meat, so I had to get a fairly large tray of the things. But the three "men" of my family are big eaters, so I wasn't worried.
But this morning I had a brief moment of clarity that I probably actually had more food than we needed for one meal. Remembering that my father-in-law was gone for the day on business, I invited his lovely new wife for dinner. She gladly accepted!
Of course, now we had five people and four artichokes. That wasn't quite right. So what did I do? I went to the store to buy another artichoke. My FIL's wife called to say that he would be arriving from the airport around dinnertime, so he might be able to join us as well. Super! I put a second artichoke in the bag.
Then I stopped to think. Wait, how many pork chops do I have? I think there were five in the tray I bought. I'm not so sure that's enough for six people. So I went back to the meat aisle and sure enough, the Max Packs were still on sale. I got another one.
Now I had 10 pork chops and six artichokes. The meal needed something else to round it out, so I got two pounds of sweet potatoes to make oven fries along with it. Eh, maybe we'd have a few leftovers, but that's better than not having enough food, right?
Reality didn't hit until about 4:00 this afternoon, an hour before dinner was supposed to be served, when I realized I'd need two pots to cook the artichokes in. Okay, two pots, double the broth, no biggie. (I still hadn't accounted for multiplying the time it took to trim the things.) At 4:30, I had the globes steaming and got cracking on the sweet potato fries. That was easy, since I have a machine that slices them. They got popped into the oven at around 4:45.
About that time, Mrs. FIL arrived and asked if there was anything she could do to help. Since I still had the meat to get to, I gladly accepted and turned over the artichoke cooking to her (turns out, she grew the things at one time and knows all about doneness and other important things). I pulled the two Max Packs out of the frig.
The recipe I was using called for four chops, and since I had 10, I multiplied the seasoning amounts times 2.5. Even when I had to measure in 1/4 cup each of onion and garlic powders (one ounce), the magnitude of the matter didn't register. But once I had the oil heated in my--large--electric skillet, another reality presented itself.
"Huh," I said out loud. "I guess I'll have to use two skillets. These pork chops are really big." Mrs. FIL agreed. Even so, I could only get eight chops cooking. Two went back into the frig.
Now I had two pots boiling, two skillets frying, two pans of sweet potato fries baking, and two children whining that they were hungry and couldn't they eat yet?? Thank goodness for Mrs. FIL and her savvy with spatula and spoon. I'll spare you the rest of the blow-by-blow, but by the time we sat down to eat, it was almost 6:00 and there were food and dishes everywhere.
When both children opted against artichokes, and one of them also declared he didn't feel well and only ate two bites of pork, and slender Mrs. FIL cut a pork chop in half to serve to herself--and I remembered in a rush that she and FIL regularly split entrees at restaurants--I admit I began to panic a little. "Eat lots of artichoke!" I encouraged the adults with a forced smile.
What have I learned from this?
For one thing, don't plan on one artichoke or one pork chop per child. For another, check the weight of the meat you're buying instead of counting the number of cut pieces. My friends, when I stopped for a minute tonight and added up the weight of the meat I had purchased, those two Max Packs included 10 pounds of pork chops. Ten pounds. For six people. Mind you, not six Marines. Two small children, two women (who both happen to be trying to keep their weight down), one man who traveled all day and wasn't hungry, and Jay.
By the way, thank goodness for Jay. He made a valiant effort to eat as much as he could hold, bless him.
In the end, Jay and I will each have an artichoke tomorrow, and I'll be looking up whether or not it's feasible to freeze pre-breaded/fried pork chops. Not that I feel like eating more pork any time soon.
I think I'd rather have some strawberry jam.
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