Non-yellow rice and raw chicken

Last night's dinner was a complete disaster.

In my defense, I felt awful all day long. It was just one of those days when you have every pregnancy symptom possible at exactly the same time and just want to curl up in bed and go to sleep for the rest of your life, or at least until the pregnancy is over. But you can't. Because you're the mom. And two-year-olds have high expectations.

Andrew wasn't due home until 6 so I wanted to get something at least started.

I decided to make yellow rice. I threw all the ingredients into a pot and then went to lie down on the couch and didn't move until after Andrew got home.

"Will you stir the rice?" I asked him.

I had thrown a bullion cube but hadn't stirred long enough to dissolve it fully before I decided that being horizontal and doing nothing would be much more useful to my well-being than being vertical and stirring a pot ever would be.

"I can't," he said, "All the water is cooked out. Look's like dinner is ready. What is it?"

"It's yellow rice," I said.

"No, it's not."

"Whatever, will you make something to go with it? I can't think of anything."

Andrew microwaved some frozen chicken and peas and we sat down to eat dinner.

I looked at the pot. Andrew was right. It wasn't yellow. Turns out that instead of using saffron I had used some super-spicy-hot-dried-and-shredded-peppers that happened to look a lot like saffron.

The chicken that Andrew microwaved was not the fully-cooked kind. It was the you-really-do-need-to-cook-me-yourself kind. Packing here sometimes isn't very clear about this kind of think so we only discovered this detail when he went to cut a piece of chicken off to put on Rachel's plate and ended up with a yucky, half-cooked chicken mess.

The rice was little better. It was too spicy and either under salty or over salty depending on how close you scooped to where the bullion cube finally ended up dissolving.

Andrew and I both had seconds of rice--aside from being too spicy it wasn't too bad. The only thing Rachel kept asking for, though, was peas.

"More peas pease! More peas pease!"

Dinner was supplemented by peanut butter and honey sandwiches and left-over birthday cake.

Next time I feel that awful I'm not even going to attempt anything before Andrew gets home. No dinner is better than a completely neglected, haphazard dinner. It probably would have been so much better if Andrew had had to decide what to make all on his own because I can guarantee that he wouldn't have chosen chicken if I hadn't already made rice!