Necessity really is the Mother of Invention in the kitchen

Not the kind of book you might expect me to write; a book about my kids, my dogs, or MacGyver. I’m gonna write a cook book.

I’m still working on the perfect title, but here are some ideas:

Crap I Found in my Pantry and Turned Into Dinner

Crap I Found in my Fridge and Turned Into Dinner

Crap I Found in my Pantry That I Put WITH the Crap I Found in my Fridge and Turned Into Dinner

Hmmm…I may have to write sequels.

Wait! NO! I GOT IT!

Desperate Dinners

That’s PERFECT! (by the way, I just put that under copyright, so don’t even try to steal it)

My cookbook, Desperate Dinners ©, will be crammed full of tasty, quick, easy pantry-purging meals that will satisfy extraordinarily picky teenagers and a husband who’ll eat anything to make you happy.

The inspiration for my new venture stemmed from my 21 years of poor planning. I know people who actually go to the grocery store WITH A LIST. Not only is it organized by aisle, it’s comprised of products they actually intend to use. I love that concept. Not enough to fully embrace it and learn the art of meal planning, but I sure do admire my BFFs who can pull it off week after week.

My romps to the grocery store typically take place AFTER one of my Desperate Dinner © nights when I have rendered the pantry and/or fridge completely devoid of anything edible. Maybe I’ll write a book called Desperate Grocery Shopping (also just copyrighted, thank you), too. It could be a prequel or a sequel, depending on how you look at it.

So, Desperate Dinners are the result of poor planning and nearly barren shelves. But as School House Rock alluded to, “Necessity is the Mother of Invention.,” and, by gum, some of my most desperate dinners were my best!

Until I get my act together, however, and actually compile the recipes in some sort of book, I’m going to do my darndest to document them here. That way, when my kids say, “Hey, that was actually pretty good. You should make it again.” I won’t have to look at them with a frozen, horrified stare realizing I have no idea what ingredients I used to make it. (I have literally rummaged through the garbage before looking for the empty cans that might have gone into that night’s recipe.)

Here’s to Desperate Dinners with a nod to Mother Necessity. “Mother Necessity With her good intentions, Where would this country be Without her inventions?”

“I know how I wanna die.”

Not words you want to hear from your kids.

Before you get alarmed and teary, these are MY kids, so there’s got to be some weird twist.

This statement was made by my daughter Madeline in a follow up to her “bucket list” announcement a couple of days ago. At dinner last night she finally remembered what was on it.

“I want to drink from a chocolate fountain!”

Sounds like a reasonable, normal thing for a 13-year-old girl to want to do.

“Oh, and I know how I wanna die. I want to jump out of an airplane without a parachute!”

(screeeeeeeeeeech) I really need to find a way to insert that sound into a post.

What?

“Yeah, that’d be awesome. You know, just floating, flying… the sky, the wind….”

The ground?

“Well, yeah, but it’d be awesome before that.”

Some movie lines transcend time. They become so much a part of our culture they almost supersede the movies that spawned them. Like, “Here’s looking at you kid,” and “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

I’m not talking about those.

I’m talking about the lines that have become part of our every day language. Well, okay, part of MY every day language. It’s funny how those phrases can take the place of actual original sentences and still get the point across.

Here are some of my favorites and ways to incorporate them into your every day language.

Cut it out, Napoleon! Just make yourself a dang quesadilla!  You’re whining and you need to stop. Seriously. Now. And you need to make me a quesadilla. Seriously. Now.

We’re going to need a bigger boat.  This one can actually only be used if you have a cigarette hanging from your lower lip, but it’s awesome for relating severe inadequacy.

I don’t know how to put this, but I’m kind of a big deal.  This one is awesome because it’s not really about you, it’s about that flaming egomaniac in your office. The BEST part about this one is that egomaniacs rarely watch anything but themselves, much less classic movies like Anchorman so you and your smarty-pants co-workers can gang up on Narcissus and just start referring to him as “Ron Burgundy” and he’ll never be the wiser. See? Awesome.

Randy lay there like a slug. It was his only defense.  You’ve fallen. I’m sorry that happened to you, but I’m going to go ahead and blurt out this unhelpful yet fitting movie line before I come to your aid. Best used with friends or relatives. Strangers don’t seem to take it very well.

Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!  You’re touching me and you need to not be. I’ll also just pull it out in a Pavlovian response to anything remotely relating to Planet of the Apes. It’s just that fun to say.

Sixty-percent of the time, it works every time.  Um, do I really need to explain that?

You are literally to stupid to insult.  You are literally too stupid to insult.

Well you’re dead now, so SHUT UP!  Honestly, you’re prattling on about nothing and no one is listening to you so, really, shut up. The person this phrase is spoken to can only redeem themselves if they immediately follow it with “But I didn’t eat the mousse.”

Oh boys, lookie what I got here!  Okay, it’s not really translatable into any useable every day phrase but I DARE you to say it and not spend the next 30 minutes trading “Blazing Saddles” lines with your BFF. In fact right now my mind is aglow with whirling, transient nodes of thought careening through a cosmic vapor of invention.

Wanna spend more countless hours sifting through all your favorite movie lines? Check out this cool site killerclips.com I promise you’ll spend more time on it than Pinterest.

A trip to the dentist.

I’m not afraid of the dentist. Honestly. I’ve never has a bad experience at the dentist so there’s really no reason for me to not like going.

Wait. Does talking to you while you have a mouthful of metal, tools, and other people’s hands count as a bad experience?

Why is that? And I’m not just talking about a monologue where he details his latest golfing adventure. I’m talking about a fully involved two-way conversation:

Him: So what do you have planned for this summer? Going anywhere exciting?

Me: Umph, ooogglllurgle, uuhh aaagghh.

Him: What?

Me: AH U EEGIN IDDDIN EEE??!??!

Yeah, my dentist is hilarious.

Read it. Learn it. Live it.

Sometimes I say words or phrases that require translation. Here are a few. Feel free to add your own in the comments section.

Cheese and rice: (adjective) A veiled attempt to disguise using the Lord’s name in vain. I actually stole this from a five-year-old. It’s awesome and it keeps me out of Hell.

Dancing bear: (adjective/noun): A term used to describe lack of grace, typically aimed at my daughter who broke her wrist tripping over her own feet. She has also gotten a comb stuck in her hair.

Dippity-dop: (noun) A moron. “Dippity-dop over there blinks and thinks it a new day.”

Halo: (noun) The one clear spot in the sky when the surrounding areas are dark and ominous. Can only be used when referring to the exact spot YOU are standing, e.g. “We’re at the concert venue waiting for Chuck Wicks to take the stage. Don’t let the weather fool you: we are in the HALO right now at the Fish House.”

Halio: (adjective) A feeble attempt to avoid saying the word “Hell.” For example, upon seeing my son riding his skateboard in the house I might say, “What the halio?” Or I might just say, “What the HELL?”

Sha-dang-diddl-ee: (adjective) An expletive. “I don’t give a sha-dang-diddl-ee what you wear.” Can be used in conjunction with additional adjectives and nouns for emphasis. “I don’t give a flying sha-dang-diddl-ee squat what you wear!” Notice the required use of an exclamation point in the second example. THAT’S the power of sha-dang-diddl-ee.

Thingiddy-bop: (noun) A thing. “Put your whatsy-whooz-it on the thingiddy-bop.”

Twitterverse: (noun) The world of Twitter. It is comprised of “Planet Twitter” and it’s orbiting moons Tweet, Twit, and Twat… wait, no, that’s not right…

Whatsy-whooz-it: (noun) An object. See “thingiddy-bop.”

Whoozy-whats-it: (noun) A person. This is typically reserved for someone whose name I have forgotten, typically my children’s friends but sometimes my children as well.

Yesterday was a sharp reminder of the power of a sincere apology. And the need for genuine forgiveness.

My youngest son, Asher, is ten-years-old. He has epilepsy and cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair so his school bus picks him up in front of our house every morning.

Yesterday, as my husband was helping load Asher and his chair onto the bus, a young woman drove her car slowly past the his stopped bus. She knew what she was doing. She caught my husband’s eye as she approached the end of the bus and he watched her drive through the intersection and away.

I wish I could tell you this was an unusual occurrence, but unfortunately it happens at least once a month, Someone is too busy, in too much of a hurry to stop while a bus is loading or unloading kids. What happened next, however, was totally out of the norm.

About an hour later, we heard a knock at the front door. It was the woman who had driven past the bus. She was shaking.

“I am so sorry for what I did. It was so disrespectful to your son and your family.”

We were in stunned.

“I was in a hurry, I was running late, I knew I should have stopped – that’s why I went so slowly – but all I was thinking about was where I needed to be. I am so sorry.”

I wanted to hug her.

Yes, she had absolutely done something wrong. She had, in fact, broken the law. But I have never encountered someone with such pain and remorse. I couldn’t believe she had the shear guts to come to our door to apologize not knowing the reaction she might get from us – especially knowing she would most likely encounter a man and not even knowing I was home.

What really hit me was that she was taking full responsibility for her actions. How often does that happen? This lady broke the law but was willing to own up and face whatever consequences we threw at her.

She was on our doorstep, physically shaking with anguish at what she had done. She needed to hear she was forgiven.

“Thank you so much. I really appreciate that,” my husband told her.

She smiled, weakly but gratefully, apologized again, and left.

I think all of us came away from that experience better for it and with a deep appreciation for the power of being human.

My Life in Polaroids.

I love being from the south. Which is funny because I’m not really from the south at all. I’m not really “from” any where.

Nine years ago I was “from” Las Vegas. Four years before that, Pensacola (the first time). Prior to P’cola, I was a seventeen-year Texan. When I moved to Texas in 1977, I SWORE I would never utter the phrase “ya’ll.” No respectable Mile-Higher would ever say anything other than “you guys.” And before I became an Orange-Crush-Loving Bronco fan, I lived in an igloo in Alaska with a polar bear for a pet. At least that’s what my 4th-grade classmates thought at Aurora Elementary when I told them I had moved to Denver from Anchorage.

But even with all my “worldly” travels, I have spent the better part of my life in the south. Even Las Vegas qualifies (it’s just a smidge north of 36 degrees latitude). And I’ve absorbed a bit of each southern city I’ve had the privilege of calling home.

From Texas I learned strength and confidence, how to make tamales and love grits, and proper hat and boot etiquette. In Florida, I learned true southern hospitality, how to surf, and what a REAL beach should look like. And Vegas taught me I could be rough and dusty on the edges one day and glam it up like a rock star the next and not lose myself in the process.  I’ve fully embraced the southern culture.

So even though I’m not really from the south, I call myself a southerner. The best part? My truly southern (born, raised, and never left) friends accept me as their own. It’s the southern way.