First Dinner Party

I made my first roast a few weekends ago. If that doesn’t classify as an important benchmark in the life of a newlywed wife, what does?

I’ve concluded that there are two things that are nearly impossible to mess up when cooking.

The first is casseroles. If you throw shredded potatoes or noodles into a pan with a mixture of other random things and leave it in the oven for 45 minutes, you’re bound for success.

The second is anything you put into a crock pot. You can put things together in a crock pot that you would never dream of putting in your mouth at the same time and somehow, in ten hours or more, it magically becomes a culinary delight.

The third week we were in our trailer, I made a tuna casserole and it made us both a little sick. Maybe it was the tuna. Maybe it was the chef. Either way, my track record for impossible-to-mess-up foods was looking shaky. I admit I became nervous about the roast.

In light of my apprehension, I did what any reasonable newlywed wife would do. I called for my mommy.

Something I learned when I came to college is that mom is the portal to all knowledge necessary for survival in the real world. There are more reasons than I can count, but I’ll share a few that come to mind.

1.      She has every cookie recipe in the universe memorized.

2.      She knows whether or not you can still eat certain things after they’ve been in the fridge for three months.

3.      She can locate anything in any grocery store over the phone, even when she’s never been to that grocery store. From 200 miles away, it still takes her less than 40 seconds to lead me to the deviled ham (or something similarly obscure) when I’ve been searching for over 20 minutes.

4.      She is the MacGyver of cooking. When a recipe calls for eggs, milk, butter, sour cream and brown sugar, and all you have is four cups of flour, tap water and a paperclip, she can still tell you what to do to make it work.

So, obviously, I called mom for roast-making information. Her step-by-step instructions made it sound easier than it could possibly be in reality.

I followed said instructions and left with Aaron for church. It really was that easy.

Three hours later…voila! Actually, it was still raw, so we didn’t eat it for lunch. But our house smelled AWESOME. I felt like the best wife ever.

Since we couldn’t eat it until dinner time anyway, Aaron had a great idea. Have friends over for dinner. So we did. Regardless of the difficulty most people have in finding our trailer, they found us after only one round of instructions. Our friends are smart. That’s why we like them.

I’d have to say, with the combination of making our first roast as married people AND having our first dinner party, this was a fantastic day of benchmarks for us.

Everything went fairly smooth until dinner was almost over. We were all chatting and enjoying just being together when we heard a slight cracking sound and our friend Brent disappeared. For a moment, I was afraid that a hole had opened up in the kitchen floor of our trailer and that we’d never see Brent again.

It turns out that Brent just broke our chair. Once we all managed to stop laughing we got him a folding chair and packed the pieces of my grandmother’s dining room chair to the spare bedroom so we could fix it later.

All in all, a memorable, and extremely funny, first dinner party.

And the roast was fantastic. I feel like an extremely legit wife.