We ventured out of the frozen tundra yesterday for supplies. We were out of the essentials like frozen breakfast sandwiches, kitty litter and "plastic" cheese, which isn't really plastic, nor come to that is it really cheese, but that's for another post. We got to the mega warehouse store and filed in with our cart, following lemming-like the crowds before us. We had a list and a purpose and so we tore ourselves away from the troglodytes staring at the big screen TVs (ohhh, pretty lights!) and wandered up and down the huge racks of things looking for our listed items. Our goal is always to stay on the list, stay on task and for god's sake don't stray to the candy aisle. Our goal never seems to make it. When we stray, the baked good cry out for rescue. The large tubs of frozen cream puffs look longingly-albeit through a frosty lens--at us. But what caught my eye yesterday and unfortunately I couldn't resist were two tubs of a fast food's sweet potatoes. I had seen other offerings from this fast food place before. Nothing enticed me, not the spiced apples, not the mac and cheese. But the sweet potatoes caught me in a vulnerable moment. So I plopped them in the cart. My husband is not a fan of sweet potatoes, really. I meant he could eat them if he had to eat something, but they just aren't his cup of tea-er-um potatoes-well, you know what I mean. He raised his eyebrows at me, I'm usually the one who tells him to put stuff back because a)this place sells stuff by the gallon and we don't need a gallon of whatever-it-was and b)it'll go bad before he decides that he really didn't like it that much before he bought this ginormous size. I understood his look. It was two tubs of the same stuff, it looked to be enormous since there are only two of us now in residence and who was gonna eat all that? I refused to put it back, though. And here's why:
This fast food restaurant isn't around as much anymore, but in it's "heyday" if you will, it was everywhere. Our family who was busy almost all the time, made it a practice to eat dinner together every night, no matter what the circumstances--unless the circumstances were too large to overcome--think working late, a basketball game in which one of the children figured in as a player as opposed to just watching, a committee meeting either at school or church that couldn't be accommodated by coming in later. Some of those days, I was just too tired to cook, or too lazy, take your pick. Some days it was a toss up. I was (and still am) the chef in the family, my husband never learned to cook and it usually didn't bother me to do this. But some nights it did and the fast food place that served chicken or turkey dinners with sides to go along was too good to pass up. So we would write down our preferences and the hubby and one of the kids would trek over to this place, get the order and come back. We'd feast on a dinner which though tailored to our specific likes, usually included at least either a fruit or a vegetable and it wasn't just a hamburger. I felt positively virtuous some nights after these dinners. So we fast forward to more recently. The children are no longer in residence and I'm feeling, especially on the weekends, somewhat melancholy about this. You'd think by now I'd be done with particular pity party, but I never was one to follow trends and this obviously isn't one I'm going to go along with either--for a long time. Anyway, I see something that I can do to sort of "relive" the days of having take out around the table with four of us instead of two and it doesn't cost a fortune. I'm not putting it back.
So I got home and when it came time to make dinner, I followed the package directions, put it in one of our own dishes and served it up. And it tasted really good. I remembered how much our son loved these as well and when we visited him out in sunny CA, we stopped at this fast food place and we both indulged in a side of these delicious sweet potatoes, laughing and remembering those dinners. And just for this particular President's Day weekend, I could pretend they were just upstairs in their room getting ready to come down to dinner. It was worth two tubs...
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