Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Pimentos, Blood, and Imagination

So I have been obsessed about cooking this casserole for a week now. We will not even get into the reasons for the obsession, but I took this project on like all that I do, and was soon consumed with perfecting this meal.

Earlier this week my husband was going to run to the store to get something he was having a “hankerin” for. Wanting to seize the moment, I quickly grabbed a notepad and began scribbling the ingredients I needed for my masterpiece I would be cooking on Thursday night – which is Family Night. One of the ingredients was a jar of pimentos. I knew immediately that this would throw Indiana Jones off. It was not one of the major food groups – cheese, milk, bread, or nutter butters. So I just waited for him to notice. He called from the store. “Where in the heck are pimentos?” I had planned for this so I said, in my sweetest voice possible, “They are in the same aisle as the olives.” This makes perfect, rational sense, right? Wrong. They were not in that aisle, and for the next 15 minutes my husband roams through the store looking for a 4 oz jar of pimentos -- his frustration and pure hatred for shopping growing by the minute.

He makes it home and I begin unpacking all the groceries. He has done so well. I am content and pleased, ready to tackle the casserole. My little heart grows with anticipation on how great this meal will be. My family will “ooo” and “ahh” and realize what a wonderful mother they have. This might even put me in the running for Mother of the Year again.

I come home from work ready to start the all-star supper. My chicken has been roasting all day and everything looks great. I am to the point of needing the pimentos. I go over to the refrigerator…no pimentos. I look in the pantry…no pimentos… I call for Indiana Jones. He does not know, but he can sense my growing panic so he begins to help me look. They are no where. We call the babysitter. Maybe she has a passion for pimentos that she could not bridle. But she was clueless. I could not go on without pimentos. It would be like a baseball player without their glove, a pea without its pod, a monkey without its banana, a jouster without his sword-thingy. You get the point. So Indiana Jones grabbed his keys to go get another jar of pimentos, after all, he knew right where they were. But I opened up the spice cabinet and right there they were. Oh, joy and jubilation. The work continues.

Indiana Jones goes to pick up my oldest daughter at the neighbor’s house and takes our 3-year-old punk with him. That leaves me and the baby to continue our cooking.

I go to open the jar of the blessed pimentos. I am so happy…life is perfect. I slip and the jar smashes to the ground shattering into shards of glass. I am frozen. I momentarily wonder if I could just rinse them off and still add them. A little glass never hurt anyone, right? Then I remember reading this book one time about this woman in Italy who ground up glass and put it in her husband’s supper to kill him. I decided to chunk the pimentos. I was so sad. I stepped over to grab a rag a felt a sharp pain in my foot. I tried to scrap it off with my other foot and managed to slice a pretty deep cut. Oh, I would be okay. I must stop at nothing to finish this stunning success of a casserole. I continued to walk back and forth in the kitchen to get this thing in the oven. By the time I was finished, it looked like OJ Simpson’s house. My tile is white and I was bleeding profusely. I was getting angry. It had been SEVERAL minutes, where was my husband? I could be passed out and how would he know? Didn’t he care about the safety of his wife?

I had a momentary thought. For a brief, tiny moment I considered possible taking a shard of the glass and placing it on my neck while profusely rubbing blood all around the area. Then, as I lie there waiting for death to grip me, Indiana Jones would walk in and see his lovely life at death’s door…and feel horrible about leaving me for so long. A mean anything could have happened. But that thought fled quickly as I rationally realized he would probably just realize that he would have to load the kids up and go to McDonald’s.

He finally returned and he did feel bad as he helped me scrub the blood out of the grout. But my foot is KILLING me. It is not that bad of a cut, but it REALLY hurts.

So I am calling the Pimento Company. I mean HELLO! It is the 21st century….Haven’t they heard of plastic?

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