Dinner drama

Since this is pretty much my job now, I decided that if I'm going to do this housewife/stay at home mom thing, I'm going to bust my butt to try and do it to the absolute best of my ability. That means getting out of bed at a decent hour, keeping it more or less tidy around here, and tending to all the stuff that slipped by the wayside due to both of us being at work all day, including taking up cooking again.

So, yesterday I went and picked up a few items from the grocery store (freaking Safeway is almost as spendy as Whole Foods these days!!!) and got my butt in the kitchen. I made:

Rosemary bread, from scratch. Humid July weather in Phoenix is PERFECT for making bread rise, in case you were wondering. Just cover it with a towel and set it on the patio!

and Spaghetti. Now, most people do spaghetti as an "easy" meal. A jar of Ragu, a pound of ground beef, and some noodles, and you're good to go. Well, that crap doesn't fly in my house. I worked on this for over an hour. I figure if I'm going to take the time to do something, I'm going to do it right. Organic whole wheat pasta, extra lean ground turkey, organic veggies (carrots, zucchini, mushrooms, peppers, onions, garlic, celery), organic tomatoes and tomato sauce, lots of different spices and seasonings... this is a dish that I know, without a doubt, that I totally rock.

I don't make it very often though, because it's a lot of work dicing and slicing up all those veggies! True, when I make it we have dinner for at LEAST three nights, but the initial amount of labor tends to make me avoid it.

You can see though, that I put a LOT of effort and care into last night's dinner. Which is why when I went to go to bed at midnight, FIVE hours after we had finished eating, I was so flipping PISSED to see it still sitting in the pot on the stove, now wasted.

We had each only eaten one bowl!

In our house, there is an arrangement - I don't do dishes. I cook, he cleans. It may have been in our wedding vows. It should have been! My mom used to beat me as a child over the dishes when I was a kid (but not my brothers, they were excused from that chore because they didn't do it "right") so I just don't do it now. End of story.

That means, after dinner, it's my husband's job to go in, put away the leftovers, and clean up. I'm a pretty tidy cook, I don't trash the place when I cook as I'm used to working in close quarters. Especially considering what I made, and the amount of time I spent on it, it's not too bad.

But, instead of cleaning up, he watched TV, read iPhone reviews on cNet.com, and caught up on his video game message boards. In the meantime, about $20 worth of mostly organic, from scratch spaghetti sauce went to waste. We got into a huge fight about it, and my head is killing me today as a result.

It's like, why should I bother? Why make an effort? If I had just been lazy and told him to go to McDonalds for dinner, this never would have happened. We would have saved some money too. What's the point of putting forth any kind of effort if in the end, it's just wasted time and effort. At least if I had busted out a jar of Ragu we'd only be out of a few bucks and about 15 minutes worth of time.

Maybe this is why lazy slobs are lazy slobs. It's easier and you don't have to worry about setting yourself up for disappointment.