Ok, so the barbecue...it went really well. It ended up that most of the guys at loose ends showed up, along with one family. I had a ton of food, including twenty ears of corn (they're ten for two bucks at Kroger's right now, so I'd gotten ten and someone else brought ten).
There were two small children there. It took only a couple minutes before they realized I spoke their language. Then for the rest of the night they followed me around or came running up to me to show me something important, like a rock.
Keith mentioned once that maybe I could get a job taking care of children but I nixed it. I'm tired of taking care of other people's children. I want my own. I just couldn't take it at this point. It was fine when I was younger; I loved it. But doing it now would just be like grinding salt into the wound.
Speaking of which, we are picking up the pills today. It's such a relief to be able to actually be doing something, taking action. The worst part about trying to get pregnant and failing is the lack of control over the whole process. It's all so vague and mysterious.
For the last few days Keith has been complaining of a craving for Chinese food, specifically sweet and sour chicken. Just for kicks, yesterday I went on line and looked up a recipe. I found one.
That recipe took some studying. I had to rewrite it twice and finally devised a code to indicate which ingredients were for the sauce, which for the batter, etc. After the shocking realization that I actually had all the ingredients in house, I girded my loins for some serious cookery.
First I sauteed a chopped green pepper with onion, set that aside and then dethawed two chicken breasts in the sink. I put flour, an egg, some oil and corn starch in a bowl, realized I couldn't mix it by hand and dumped it in my gun metal grey KitchenAid.
By now things are getting messy, but there was no backing out. I poured water into the flour mix until it made a thick batter, poured it back into the original bowl and put that aside. (I didn't want to put raw chicken in my stainless steel KitchenAid bowl. It just felt blasphemous.)
I fished the aforementioned raw chicken breasts out of the by now luke warm water and began the disgusting process of hewing it into one inch size pieces, as well as hacking off the fat and grizzle. I dumped the chicken pieces into the batter and took a deep breath.
I washed a few things and prepared for the next step, which was frying. By now Keith had come home and was ecstatic about the prospect of sweet and sour chicken. When he realized how terrified I was of deep frying, he offered to stick around in order to put out the potential grease fire.
One cup of vegetable oil went into a pan on high heat. Shortly it began to bubble all by itself. It seemed alarming to me, so I turned the heat down. Keith flicked water into the oil and it hissed up in a definitely evil way. I knew it was ready but I was dancing around in sheer nervousness, afraid to go anywhere near the ominous sheet of hot oil.
So Keith ended up taking a metal serving fork and dumping some pieces in, where they did nothing more than bubble. When I saw how he was clumping them together and putting too much in at one time, I quickly stepped back in and assumed command of the fork.
I devised a system where the first fork put the batter soaked chicken in and another fork fished the cooked chicken out, all while wearing an oven mitt to protect my hand from the oil spray. I got into a pretty good rhythm but I felt certain that due to the oil having been too hot, the chicken hadn't had a chance to cook all the way through.
On went to the oven at three fifty, a sheet of tin foil went over a baking sheet and a cooling rack over that and all the chicken nuggets were laid out, for further cooking. The pan of hot oil was moved to the back of the oven, were it quietly melted the hot pad it was on, unbeknownst to me until much later.
My kitchen is now a wreck and about four hundred degrees hot. I have dishes filling both sinks and flour sprinkled over the counter tops, flour hand prints over my purple top and I have yet to make the sweet and sour sauce.
My small sauce pan comes out and is filled with water, vinegar, sugar and pineapple juice from a can of said fruit. It fills almost to the rim and I consider moving to a larger pot, but scrap that idea. It boils. In a separate container I mix cornstarch and water to get a thin glop, which I then pour into the boiling glop. It immediately seizes up and becomes a glop with the consistency of grout, or perhaps weather sealant. About the same color, too.
At this point, I'm suppose to add two drops of orange food coloring, but I don't have it. I fish out my one remaining clean bowl, dump in the pineapple and the sauteed veggies (the poor veggies which have been mouldering in a forgotten corner while all the other excitement happened). I fished out the chicken nuggets from the oven, put the pan on my last remaining piece of counter space and threw the chicken into the bowl. Lastly, I took the glop and poured it over all, tossing to coat.
It was the moment of truth. Keith took a nugget and tasted. Immediately his eyes went wide.
"That is awesome," he breathed.
We dumped the mixture onto two plates and retreated to the living room to gorge. It tasted exactly like take out sweet and sour chicken. It would have looked like it too, if only I had had orange food coloring.
The rest of the night Keith spent on the phone to various friends and relatives, bragging.
"No man, completely from scratch. Dude, she dethawed the chicken and everything..." I heard once as I walked by the man room, later on.
The only bad part is that now he expects me to make crab Rangoon's.
