It’s All in the Timing

It may have taken me two hours to cook dinner the other night.  I’m okay with the idea of taking two hours to prepare dinner (I’m sure that some of my anxiety over where my time goes is connected to the fact that I make a new meal for Brian and I almost every night), but this meal shouldn’t have taken 2 hours.  It should’ve taken like, half an hour.  Maybe.

Here’s the thing: sometimes I get distracted.  And sometimes I forget about the sides and accompaniments; I can only think about the main dish.  And that is pretty much exactly what happened last Saturday when I set out to make Julie’s Simple Curry Sauce.  Please note the word “simple” in the title, not “2 hour meal”.

It all started so well.  I remembered to put the tofu in the tofu press a few hours earlier.  I had all of my ingredients.  I started cooking around 5 pm.  The curry sauce was thickening up beautifully.   The tofu was baking in the oven. I had defrosted some frozen vegetables in the microwave.  Then, about 4 minutes before the sauce was supposed to be done, I had a revelation.  “Brian, did you want rice with this?”  Of course he wanted rice, that’d been the plan all along and I’m not sure how I feel about curry without rice.  So, I started some rice.  What’s another 20 minutes, right?

Shortly before the rice was done, I finally grabbed the vegetables from the microwave.  And then I looked at them.  And then I decided that it didn’t look like enough for us.  So, instead of microwaving what was left in the bag (don’t ask me why), I pulled out another pan, dumped the cooked and frozen vegetables in, and proceeded to cook them.  This took probably another 15 minutes or so.

When all was said and finally done, my tofu was cold, but everything else was warm and we had a complete meal.  And it was almost 7.  I realize the above story doesn’t sound like it should’ve taken 2 hours to transpire, but it did.

But you know what, it was really tasty.  If you’re at all organized and you like curry, you really should make this curry sauce.  It’s not as hard as I make it look.

And that is why I didn’t accomplish as much this weekend as I wanted to.  Or at least that’s the excuse I’m using.  I’d like to say that it won’t happen again and I’ll be more organized next time, but I know that’s not true.