Why I Don't Often Have Dinner Guests

For a person who loves good food, I have a strong dislike for preparing it. As a result, dinners at my house are often sub-par. Take today for instance. I planned on trying to copy my friend's delicious shepherd's pie, so I went out to the freezer to get some ground beef to defrost. Hours later, when I was ready to cook the meat and assemble it all, I find out it wasn't ground beef I'd defrosted after all. It was strawberries. So we had waffles instead.

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I blame my mother somewhat. She is a good woman, but her freezer organization skills did not prepare me to be an upstanding culinary genius. We used to joke about my mom's "freezer stew". Whenever it came time to clean out the freezer, she'd throw a bunch of odd vegetables and stuff together and call it dinner.

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Her excessive resourcefulness is another trait I picked up. It has many benefits, of course. I'm not wasteful and I can manage money well. If I grab something and defrost it, we're eating it for dinner darn it, I don't care what it is. There were many instances growing up that were painfully embarrassing for me as a child that I know I would totally do to my kids even so. One that made me want to sink into the floor as a middle-schooler was my homemade trumpet case. My old case was cracked and pretty cheap, so my mom being the creative woman she was found a sturdy wooden white suitcase at a flea market and cleverly combined the innards of my old trumpet case with the outards of the sensible, dreaded suitcase. It was about 150% bigger than any other trumpet case, and looked distinctly like what it was. It didn't help that every time I walked down the hall in the morning the wood shop teacher would holler, "Hey, you goin' on a trip somewhere?"

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But my kids don't complain. They think I'm a great cook. I guess I've successfully trained them to be happy with anything that won't kill them. I shouldn't pick on my mother so either. I can't say I starved as a child, and she's not quite the most creative cook I've ever met. I have a friend who told me her mother-in-law once substituted pork and beans for refried beans, italian sausage for ground beef, cottage cheese for sour cream, and mozzerella for cheddar all in the same meal. That was the worst excuse for a taco I've ever heard of!