Cognitive decline or just an embarrassing mistake (or two)
We try and do a family meal after church on Sundays. COVID-19 put that on pause for most of last year but with very low (less than fifteen active) cases in our county we have started back. Not for the whole gang, mind you, that requires a large banquet hall. Just a subset of the gang including my wife's two children, their spouses and children...lots of children. We try and keep it simple and this week's menu was no exception. White chicken chili and regular (red) chili with beans (plus all the fixin's) were the main courses and pretty much my only responsibility as cook. My wife would prepare four dessert dishes. Seating for fifteen plus a high chair for Cruz, who turned one two days ago.
Before I tell on myself, we did a similar Sunday brunch with a different menu last Sunday and my wife was making cornbread. We have a package mix that we like and she got the package and mixing bowl and carried the package to the trash can, cut the top off and dumped the contents into the trash. Once she realized what she had just done, we had a good laugh about it. No big deal, there was another package in the pantry. It made a good story to tell the family, right?
Going back to this weekend, I did a lot of the prep work Saturday night, so Sunday before church was only a matter of quickly heating up the contents and putting them into crockpots; two of them to be exact. One white, one red. One chicken, one beef. Not rocket science. I had already heated up the already browned beef and tomato sauce, and put them into one crockpot and most of the ingredients for the white chicken chili were heating up in the other. The chicken and beans were heating in the wok, the only pan big enough to hold them and it was really full. Now, we call our kitchen a "one butt kitchen" for a reason. My wife zigged when she should have zagged and a little of the contents went on the kitchen floor. No problem, wife said she would get it. Maybe that rattled me just a little. No worries, we've got this. I went around the counter to where the crockpots were and dumped it in and started stirring but my mind was elsewhere. Then it hit me. Wrong crockpot!
What happened next was that I had a total meltdown. You would have thought that World War III had just happened in my kitchen the way I acted. Jeez, Louise! My wife talked me down off the ledge, finally, after I had paced the room, ranting and cussing and generally making a fool of myself. In the end we just put the whole mess together and made an original regular, red, white, chicken, beef chili (with all the fixin's). And it was actually pretty good. I call it my "Whoops Chili". Maybe we'll have it when you come over.