First rule of cooking

Kate, who is skilled enough to leave the kitchen when she cooks, in our Ballard kitchen. 

(the kitchen I never use & in which I do not have one single possession or item of food)

Stay in the kitchen while you are cooking. This is something I am not good at. I'd rather have something else going at the same time, why is that? It leads to disaster, though, things stuck to the bottom of pans, burning, or failing to realize that I've got the wrong burner on, or accidentally turned the oven off after I preheated it to 450 for the steaks. I'm getting a little better, though, now I'll stay in the kitchen mostly, doing dishes if there is a little down time. Mostly, though, I'm still cooking too many things at a time. Pasta boiling and fresh cherry tomato sauce cooking and steaks being pan-seared before their trip into the oven, and a butter sauce on the stovetop, missing most of the ingredients that would make it qualify as a sauce rather than just melted butter. 

Last weekend that meant that I made the nice fresh cherry tomato sauce but ruined it with too much salt, until Tom came in to try and rescue it, and I opened the fridge to look for some miracle rescue ingredient that we were talking about when I saw the ricotta cheese that was supposed to be part of the sauce. Whoops. Forgot! Luckily, the ricotta did in fact rescue the sauce and it was delicious, though at that point there seemed to be about a gallon of it, owing to the fact that I had added every single tomato I could find and various other things before discovering the ricotta.

Oh well.

If anyone thinks that Thanksgiving dinner will be anything less than chaotic, well, then they are an intruder who doesn't know me and should be promptly invited to vacate the premises. Or they are related to Tom and should be settled in on the couch with a nice pumpkin cracker and some crab dip and possibly a hot cider. I don't know why I think that Thanksgiving will be lovely, but I do. Between the turkey, ham and salmon, one of those things has to turn out edible, right?