A Recipe You Should Not Try

Ingredients:

• leaves from 1 cabbage delivered a week and a half ago by your beloved local food grocery delivery service
• 3 red potatoes from same service
• 4 or 5 reddish onion-y looking things you can’t really identify, from same service, but from the delivery two weeks before the one where you got the cabbage and potatoes
• grated cheddar cheese
• goat’s milk, since that’s the only kind of dairy milk you have in the house and something tells you not to substitute soy or rice milk for this one
• maybe some other stuff, because your significant is cooking and who knows what the heck is going to end up in there

Directions:

• Ignore cabbage for 1 week.
• Insist that people other than yourself make some effort to use up the cabbage, peas, and basil that have shown up in the beloved local food grocery delivery boxes in the last two shipments.
• Admit that the pickling cucumbers are probably a little farfetched for your household to use up and mentally cross them off the list.
• Explain that making a batch of eggrolls large enough to use up an entire head of cabbage is even more farfetched.
• Reject multiple internet-generated “suggestions” from your significant other of recipes that would use up cabbage.
• Admit that a recipe calling for both cabbage and potatoes might be useful in using up both cabbage and potatoes.
• Cross “breakfast tacos with potatoes” off the meal planning list.
• Read the recipe in question.
• Watch your significant other google “runner beans.”
• Explain that the higher the number of different ingredients contained in a dish, the less likely you are to eat it.
• Express appreciation when is agreed that runner beans be excluded.
• Days later, when your significant other has a day off work for the holiday and you do not (or rather, you can have a day off whenever you want it, but you don’t get paid), and your significant other asks what he or she should do with his or her afternoon, suggest making the cabbage and potatoes dish.
• Say “bye!” to your significant other as she or he heads out to the grocery store for ingredients to make a pina colada.
• Answer phone call from significant other, who is at Half Price Books, asking whether he or she should purchase a used copy of Dark Reign, the Wolverine: Origins book that comes between the Original Sin crossover and Romulus, both of which you have read.
• Knowing full well that you’re going to read the entire Wolverine:Origins series anyway, even though it’s nowhere near as good as the first book of the Wolverine: Weapon X series that you just read last week (and OMG it ROCKED), agree that Dark Reign should be purchased.
• Make mental note to add Dark Reign into the Marvel continuity non-X-Men tab of your worksheet under the theory that it follows from that New Avengers book where Wolverine is all “that’s my kid who just joined the Dark Avengers and I would like to have a word with him.”
• Ignore blender noise upon significant other’s return with pina colada ingredients.
• When significant other yells “Do you want any of this concoction?”, say no.
• Be proven completely right several minutes later when significant other says “That was disgusting.”
• Overhear significant other saying to herself or himself “Now to find that recipe again…”
• Check Firefox bookmarks for any evidence that significant other bookmarked the recipe for the cabbage and potatoes thing.
• Find nothing.
• Go back to reading blog posts about how bad The Last Airbender movie is.
• When asked to proffer an opinion on whether cabbage leaves are sufficiently cooked, guess that perhaps they do need to retain some structural integrity but then again what do you know?
• Agree that perhaps that looks like a LOT of milk.
• Ignore multiple comments by significant other about the likelihood of the dish being edible.
• Go upstairs to give two year old a bath.
• Ask significant other to bring your phone upstairs when your grandmother calls.
• Advise your grandmother on the proper placement of safety pins for basting a quilt.
• When oven timer goes off, leave significant other to supervise bath and remove cabbage and potatoes thing from oven.
• Shout up the stairs “Did you already take a spoonful out of it, or did it spontaneously develop a sinkhole?”
• Go back upstairs to dry off two year old.
• Agree with two year old that the blue big boy underwear is a fine choice.
• Assure two year old that even though he has not eaten in five hours, he does not have to eat dinner if he does not want to, but he does have to come downstairs so Mommy and Daddy can eat their dinner.
• Spoon some of the cabbage and potatoes thing onto two plates.
• Try it.
• Give up.
• Eat cereal for dinner.