Evening this and that

Can you guess from this picture, what we had for dinner?



Hint: Look hard at that top, charred imprint.

Now evenings can be quite a crazy time for us, as I suspect it is also, for most families. And particularly if it had been a long day for every one! Exhausted, and at least one of us (me included) is teetering on cranky.

Then, among other things going on, such as laundry in the basement I mustn't forget to get back to (before ironing gets tougher), there's always

homework to juggle...

... read: prod, coach...
because no matter how easy it is,
homework = no fun = inertia!

And the bulk of the daily bread (the eatable kind) to prepare...

... dinner, and lunch for the next day, before every one starts yelling, "I'm hungry!".

But if you ask me, the trickiest part to all this "mutlitasking", is not how to get dinner and lunch cooked in as short a time as possible (so that the next morning won't be a too crazy one), but...

how to distract the little child, so that the older child (the one who needs to get his homework out of the way) will not be so distracted! You can take out the most fun puzzles (for no. 2), or promise the most reasonable rewards (to no. 1). But, parents who are going through this, or have been there, you'll have a good idea what I'm talking about! And just add to that, whining and/or meltdowns from both kids, if they aren't already fighting with one another over the slightest things, and we do have ourselves quite a crazy situation, crazy evening there!

So surely, it's by God's grace that we get by, day after day, some evenings better than others. And I'll be back later, to give you a more balanced view of how wonderful family life is (hehe... really, it is)!

But was that enough time for you to think about what was that dish we had?


Does this close-up of the 'leftovers' ("zero" leftovers, as Ben would call it), give you a better idea?

Scroll down to see if you've got the right answer!
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Fish, did you say it was fish?!



It was fish (above), that I left in the oven to cook for dinner, at the same time this chicken and vegetables were being grilled in there, for the next day's lunch...



All done at about the same time, and I broiled them for a little while towards the end, which explains the charred marks on the foil around the fish.

But you know what's the most interesting part, that I've saved for last?

The fish we used was fish fillet, not the fish in its 'original' form. So there wasn't any tail or fin, but somehow that was the way it showed up on the foil. Jon saw it first, and we just thought how cool that was -- uncanny, isn't it, that resemblance to the 'real' fish?

What works for us
Among other shortcuts or ways to start food (like soup, or stew) cooking earlier in the day, straightforward dishes like this, where I just marinade and leave more than one kind of food to cook in the oven, and time them to be done at about the same time by putting in first what will take the longest to cook -- works for us.

We are bigger fans of chicken thighs and drumsticks, than breast meat, which isn't as succulent and costs more. But now and then, I buy it, too, like I do boneless, skinless chicken thighs (and especially when they are sold at less than breast meat still) because they get cooked faster than the bone-in variety. And like in this case, the chicken fillet takes about as long to be done in the oven as fish fillet, and I don't have to worry about checking on the oven so frequently.

My favourite, easy thing to do with boneless chicken, though, is to slice it up. And it makes for a wonderful all-in-one stir fry with vegetables. But usually only for when I don't have to cook extra portions (for lunch the next day), because there's just so much that can fit into a wok or deep saucepan.

Now, isn't cooking, not just eating, even amidst all the other crazy things going on, on a crazy evening, a good way to de-stress?!