Why We Had Tacos For Dinner By Mris Age 30

Maybe I'm the only one who does this stupid thing, but I doubt it, because this is the internet: when I've been sick, if I'm a little tiny bit better but nothing like well, or even if I'm not better but have just been sick for awhile, I get tired of being sick and want to do the things I could do when I wasn't sick. Because being sick is boring. And being sick since Thanksgiving? is even more boring than that.

So I announced to timprov that I wanted to try cooking dinner tonight, despite post-travel wobblies making it not particularly a great idea for me to do so. (Note: no one was even slightly injured in the making of this dinner. In fact, the vertigo is only a spice: I wobbled as I did this, I wobbled as I did that. Still not back to cooking strength. But no injuries.) Skeptically, he agreed. We had yams, because markgritter doesn't like yams and timprov and I love them, and we had sweet corn, and we had trout. That sounded like dinner to me, and not entirely unlike dinner to timprov, so onwards! Excelsior! Um.

The advantage to this plan, in the making of it, is that each thing stopped demanding my attention when the next thing would want it. I could clean the rosemary and the yams and get that in the oven to roast, shuck the corn and get that in the pot to boil, cook the bacon for the bacon fat and bacon garnish, and then cook the trout in the pan with it (and paprika and sour cherries, was my theory). So I didn't have to try to turn around a lot dealing with more than one thing at once. When vertiginous people cook, this is a big plus.

Fine. So, yams in the oven. (They're delicious.) Corn in the pot. (Perfectly fine.) At this point, timprov, who has a cold, wandered in to see how I was doing and whether he had time for a shower before dinner. "If the trout doesn't work," I said, "we can just have corn and yams and bacon!" He laughed. (timprov has always had significantly more rigid notions of what constitutes a meal than I have.) He went upstairs to shower. Bacon cooked. (Hurrah.) And then I opened the butcher paper.

See, this was ordered online. I did not watch the butcher do up this parcel of fish. I thought I had ordered trout. Byerly's thought that I had ordered a trout. So there it was, with its tail and its head, eye and all. And despite the fact that I'd taken it out of the freezer quite a bit earlier, it was still a completely solid brick of iced trout. Even if I had any experience with cooking whole fish -- even if I was interested in doing technique experiments while vertiginous, which sadly I am not -- there was no way this trout was going to be thawed enough to do useful things with in time to eat it with the rest of dinner.

So timprov, all cleaned and dressed and brushed and that, opened the bathroom door to find me sitting cross-legged on the floor of the upstairs hallway looking up at him. "So funny thing about that," I said.

(For those of you who worry about wasting food, worry not: everything could be put in the fridge and will make perfectly lovely bits of other meals. It's just that I completely ran out of upright cooking time just as we realized we would not have a main dish. So: tacos.)