I Got 99 Flaps and This is One....

Greetings from Flaplandia, a land populated by happy, often frazzled folk doing not much beyond School, Work, and never-ending School Work . We have plodded pleasantly along, the Flap tribe, punctuating the rote business of living with music lessons and performances of one kind or another. Throughout these routinized days I have most enjoyed our evening meals. Cooking is my super-power, as many of you members of the flap nation are aware.

Sure, it’s Work, and I don’t always feel like making it happen, but most of the time I enjoy the routine of listening to crazy people scream on the radio while I putter and sozzle my way to an evening meal that will make everyone happy. 

And with most dinners I pull together, I often even impress myself. I make salads that any bistro would love to have on their menu. I have figured out ways to serve dinner that make my picky eater son not feel like a freak, because I can make a palatable-for-him version of whatever main dish the rest of us our eating.  But all winning streaks hit snags. Insert sports cliche here about not always serving an ace, or hitting it out of the park, or getting the hole in one, ect. Combine that fact with this one:

There is no other full-time food preparer save me in the Flaphold. It's me or multiple pieces of toast.

The Flap household has become used to my more-than decent dinners, yet one night a few weeks ago, instead of being summoned to sit down to some heavenly yum that cures all ills inflicted in a work and school day, dinner was instead a really giant brown cracker posing as a pizza, and what was intended to be homemade pumpkin ravioli in browned butter sage sauce was in fact an undiscovered species of jellyfish...living in a freshwater swamp in the Florida panhandle.

One dish dry and brown, looking like something CURIOSITY should be roving over, the other bubbling in the pot as brackish as the contents of a sump pump.

More problems with this scenario: we tend to eat dinner on the late side (close to 7p.m., usually). And we kinda live at The Back of Beyond-at least when it comes to deciding to dine out at the last minute. But when I saw what we were up against (Mars rover landscape pizza, jellyfish rolling around in pond water), my first reaction was to grab the family and flee to a mid-priced chain restaurant. But again, it was late, and we live Not Close to anything except a farm with a herd of beef cows.

What to do, what to do. Cut to the chase, we survived. We found a box of frozen pancakes. They had deep permafrost and were somehow still extremely damp after microwaving them. Kids nibbled at the damp edges, maple syrup flowed freely that night, I can tell ya.  I ate at the edge of the cracker pizza. Kids has tall milks. Found some cookies in the freezer, called it a day.


That meal was so awful, and I have no idea why it went so pear-shaped! I was spooked. I had no inspiration, no inclination to prepare anything the next night. That meal was so bad, I decided, the kitchen actually needed a buffer-zone meal that would not take place in the house. The next day’s errands and lessons stars aligned and I came up with this plan:

Bob takes lu to cello, Archer goes with and reads during.  We take the freeway, thereby dropping me off at hannies en route to cello.  Family circles back, picks up me and our foodstuffs, we head to 99, a buffer zone restaurant with decent kid’s steaks, and if
I did not hallucinate it, a salmon Caesar on the menu that I was hankering for. At least, that’s what I recalled. But could I rely on my memories of the last time I ate here? That last time was part of a single parenting jag while flapdude was out of town. 

Who can recall what you ate when you also order the Bottomless Birdbath Margarita for a beverage?

I flipped through the menu, reading the Entree Salads page carefully--noticing that no salad, save the Caesar was without bacon. Family restaurant chains and their salads...they are practically apologizing for serving you anything cruciferous...one salad essentially had cookies on it, in the form of cinnamon croutons. This chimera of a salad seems to have  been quietly removed, if it ever existed at all.

The server was a real pro, when I asked her if I was just on crazy pills or did I ever actually see a salmon Caesar on the menu, she told me with a straight face that I could get it, “ if I wanted it”,--gently explaining that it was “just not being featured this month” but “all the ingredients were available.”

 I let the suspension of disbelief hang there, for both my dignity, and hers. I find it hard to believe every month they change out their expensive, glossy, foot long menu, but crazier shit exists in this world than a chain restaurant reprinting their menus every four weeks.  So, I not only ordered it, but Flap Dude bailed on his Stuffed Clams entree (THERE IS A GOD) and gamely said, “gimme a salmon Caesar too!”

So in love with the flap dude, if we are gonna go down, may as well go together!

The meal was served, the food was eaten. The spell was broken. I came home to a clean kitchen --not just counters and floors, but clean as in there was not a whiff of the fug of culinary calamity that settled on me 24hrs. previously. And who the hell knows what we’ll do if dinner disaster strikes again-maybe next time I will prefer swamp ravioli at home to a salmon Caesar in a booth. Stay tuned.