as I cooked this casserole and took pictures with my iPhone… I was not pretending to be on a cooking show…
ok… that was a lie… I pretended the entire time that I was on a cooking show and actually talked to my live audience a little bit… out loud…
I have a rather large imagination…
I even joked, bantered really, with the audience and told them how crazy it was that even if you just eat one piece of asparagus your pee will have a distinct odour…
and then I wondered if the production crew would cut that ‘bit’ out…
this imagination also tends to lend itself to me being able to picture myself in just about any line of work…
every class I’ve ever taken or situation I am in I’ve pictured myself leading it…
Victoria Secret just had their swimwear one hour special on TV and the farmer and I settled in with our popcorn for what we anticipated to be a riveting hour of thought provoking television…
a little background knowledge is needed to understand where it all went so terribly wrong…
I tend to think I could do just about any job in the world (and by world I mean televised world) and do it well… even though my resume would only list A&W, caretaker at a senior citizen’s home, mini-golf attendant, teacher’s assistant and homemaker…
I watch shows and then look over to the farmer like ‘see… missed my calling’… and he usually obliges with ‘you should have been a lawyer… you like to argue’ or some comment that keeps allowing me to believe that I could have been a CIA agent if not for the farm holding me back…
I watch cooking shows and say ‘why am I not on this show?… am I right kids?’… as my seven year old had just snuck upstairs to dump half her supper into the trash bin…
every season of Amazing Race I am always trying to figure out if I would do the challenge or if I would defer to the farmer to do the challenge…
to which he generally comments ‘I would go with one of your brothers… the kids can’t have us both gone for that long at the same time’… and I agree, knowing he’d go with me if the kids weren’t in the picture…
so as we settle in to watch what no couple should ever watch together, supermodels in the swimsuits rolling around in the sand and surf, my thoughts carry me to my missed Victoria Secret modelling career…
got scooped up too early by the farmer and didn’t have enough time to be discovered obviously.. in his heart he has to know he squashed my dreams of traveling the world as a supermodel…
I can’t remember what comment I said that brought upon his awful reaction but my guess is it had something to do with ‘if I was there, I would do it this way’ type of thing…
and the farmer decided to shatter my daydreams… for apparently no good reason other than he doesn’t like the fact that I can daydream way better than him…
‘you are as close to being a Victoria Secret swimsuit model as I was to making the NHL’
as soon as he said it he began to backpedal… especially when I had to quickly push under the bed the swimsuits I was planning on modelling later on and making him convince me I am just a skip and a hop away from being on the show…
his recovery was fantastic and involved statements such as…
‘it’s not because of your looks, it’s because of your age’
or
‘having three c-sections doesn’t really help your chances’
or
‘these models look like they aren’t far from your son’s age’
or
‘maybe you could be on it if they can air brush television like they do in magazines’
or
‘if they did an older mom’s episode maybe you could try out for that’
gruyere, asparagus and pea baked pasta with chicken
Ingredients:
- 1 pkg (500 g) penne
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 1 onion, diced
- 4 cloves of garlic, minced
- 1 pound asparagus, trimmed and cut into 1/2 inch pieces
- 1/4 cup white wine
- 2 cups peas, frozen
- 2 cups shredded cooked chicken
- 1/4 cup butter
- 5 tbsp all purpose flour
- 4 cups 3% milk
- 2 tsp dried mustard
- 1 tsp kosher salt
- ground black pepper
- 1/2 tsp dried tarragon (optional)
- 3 cups shredded Gruyere cheese
- 2/3 cup panko bread crumbs
- 2 tbsp olive oil
Directions:
- preheat oven to 375 degrees
- bring a large pot of salted water to boil
- cook pasta until al dente (roughly 3-4 minutes shorter than normal)
- drain pasta
- in a frying pan, add olive oil and onion
- saute and then add asparagus and garlic
- add white wine and reduce
- in a large bowl, combine chicken, peas, pasta and onion mixture
- back in the frying pan, add butter and flour and whisk until you have a paste
- gradually add the milk, whisking the entire time so you don’t allow for lumps
- add dried mustard, salt, pepper and tarragon
- when mixture is slightly thickened (it will be a bit runny), turn off the heat and add the cheese
- pour over the pasta mixture in the large bowl
- grease a 9×13 pan and pour mixture into it
- mix olive oil and bread crumbs and sprinkle this over the pan
- bake at 375 for 30 to 35 minutes
- let stand for 10 minutes before serving, for it to thicken up
I’m just so excited now for the next time we watch a NHL game and I get to, without being provoked, mention that he was the farthest thing from making the NHL as a person could get and I can’t believe he dreamed of it as as kid…
he might argue the dreams of a 9 year old boy and a 36 year old woman should not be focused on the same type of unrealistic dream job.. but I’m going to have to bring it up none-the-less…
and see how he likes having his dreams crushed…
i feed a farmer 
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