More about Dinner and boyfriends

Recently I proclaimed, because as a father you proclaim and decree (I’ll wait while the laughing stops, We really do that stuff, but no one listens any more since it is no longer a white male world) that the girls were to make a meal each week, eventually by themselves because they have reached the age where they will eventually move out or at least need to cook for themselves. On Monday, Elena wanted to make tacos. I didn’t know it was her attempt to do her first meal by herself. I got home at 5:20 (love the end time of my new job) and she wasn’t home. So I started to cook dinner. She arrived home a little before 6. She’d stopped off to get Matt and pickup some dessert. She commented that I’d almost finished cooking and could she go shower off all the grease from her job in New City. I still didn’t know she’d planned to make dinner because of my pronouncement or did I proclamate?( Is that even a word? You know proclamate, when you're in the act of proclaiming? Google word tells me it is not a word, what do they know) She goes to shower. Teri, Nastia and Sean show up. Dinner is almost ready and Teri instead of being happy is asking all of these questions about Elena cooking, that I have no answer to. That is because I didn’t know anyone was listening to me when I made my proclamation (that is a word, but Google word still has an issue with it, Maybe because I’m beating a dead horse of a joke) Elena, freshly showered, comes back downstairs and dinner is served. I cooked two pounds of beef and I added about another pound of cooked meat from the last time we had tacos. I thought I warmed up too many flour shells and cooked too many corn shells. In the end extra shell were made up. The extra corn shells I’d left were also eaten. As a twenty year old way back when I do remember being able to eat that much, but then again it was all those years ago. It was a really fun night having everybody over. When you’re in times like these often you fail to realize how special they are until they have passed and people are gone. Even though this is a repeat of a night that has happened before with different meals, it took until just now to realize this is a special time in everyone’s life that attended or attends these dinners. I look back to my twenties and there are times like these with groups of people I no longer know or who are no longer with us and I remember the fun and family times I may have not appreciated then. There is a warmth in the memories and on this night, hopefully a few people will remember, if not the specific night at least the feeling from these nights. Dinner on Tuesday was unplanned. I’d taken over Elena’s taco dinner cooking plans, on Monday, unknown to me at the time. I’d wanted to make it up to her, so I thought chicken cutlets on Tuesday would be a good idea. She had plans with Matt for Tuesday so she said Thursday would be ok. (She’d later on Wednesday evening declare she had plans again with Matt for Thursday. So I'd taken the planned dinner for Tuesday and moved it to Thursday. (I’d make someone a great wife wouldn’t I?) until the last moment. In a very un-wifly fashion I’d planned nothing for Tuesday until late afternoon on Tuesday. Dinner slowly evolved into pasta with meatballs and left over eggplant lasagna. I’d even throw in garlic bread. I knew I’d cooked too much food, but I thought Teri would be proud (it’s an italian joke, if you don’t get it go ask an italian) It was just Teri, Nastia and I eating. I leave work at five (there’s that wonderful early end time for work again) and stop off at the grocery store. I pick up pork, bread, plus salad for tomorrow and I’m done off to home. I arrive at 5:40. Drop things in the kitchen and try to let the dogs out. Bandi is old, blind and should be put down. We just don’t have the heart. He also needs to be groomed and when he’s not certain things stick to him and this time it looked like a giant hemorrhoid. I take him to the basement shower. He’s to the point he doesn’t even argue with me. I clean him off while listening to the protestations of Misha upstairs. She is afraid of Bandi, but she also looks after him and will most likely miss him when he is gone. The Bandi problem is cleaned up as well as the shower I head upstairs. I’m now behind schedule. It’s after six and Nastia is home. I throw the pork and spices into a bowl and tell Nastia to mix and make the meatballs. I go on to defrosting the eggplant lasagna and getting the water for the pasta ready. I tell Nastia to pick the pasta. She loves shells and elbows. She picks elbows. I warn her that her mother will tell her that is not the right pasta to make. There is a rule book concerning pasta. What pasta you can use for what occasion and what dish. I’ve never seen it and I have a feeling it is like measurement for recipes from grandparents. The exact nature and amount of both is unwritten for the uninitiated. How much and what spices to put in meatballs? This is why Teri is alway saying her food doesn’t taste like her mother’s and her mother most likely said the same about her mothers food, so on and so on all the way back to the beginning of time. This is why I just threw spices into the meat. Nastia does say later as she mixes the one egg I put into the mixture, “Mom always puts two eggs into the meat.” I’ve lived with her for thirty years and I never knew that. And yes, my meatballs never come out like her’s. I’ve left the garlic bread for last. Nastia tells me as I collect the items I need for the bread, “ Mom makes the bread this way and she does it that way.” I’ve watched her make the bread and I think I remember how to make it. Nastia says I should call her mother and ask how to make the bread. I joke as I cut the bread that if I call her, she’ll say it is too late to make the bread and meatballs shouldn’t be made on a weeknight. I finish up the bread and into the warm oven it goes. Teri arrives maybe twenty minutes later. She is in a bit of a mood, but considering how she likes this job, it is understandable. She comes in, puts her stuff away and sees the pasta. “Nastia” she says, “that’s the wrong pasta for sauce.” I look at Nastia, with a smile and say, “ I told you so.” Teri hears me and doesn’t think I’m very funny. I darken her mood a little more. I tell Teri, “Nastia made dinner tonight.” The reality is she made most of it. Dinner is ready and I take the lasagna and bread out of the oven. I think Nastia comments to Teri that we were not really sure how to make the garlic bread. Teri asks why we didn’t call. Nastia, ever the honest, open person, mostly tells her, “Dad said you’d tell us it was too late to make it.” Yes, that didn’t help Teri’s mood either. We serve ourselves and sit down. Teri tastes the meatballs and tells Nastia they taste good. Dinner was so good that we heated up the leftovers on Wednesday.

I did forget to add there was entertainment on Monday. Nastia did a demonstration of arm and leg farts. She attempted to recreate some of her greatest hits from her younger days when she and her sister were world class arm and leg fart competitors. With Nastia and Elena narrowly missing metaling in the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, the only year arm and leg farts were an Olympic sport. The Vancouver Times commented, their enthusiasm and athletic prowess were legendary that night. The Panel of Judges, mostly from Europe and Russia gave 8.5s and 9s. While the Russian judge’s 3 doomed the newly minted Americans to fall out of medal contention. When the Russian judge was asked why the low score? He replied, “they have become soft Americans and don’t show the promise they once showed before immigrating to America a year before the Olympics.They left because the America’s doesn’t have any farters like our daughters of mother Russia. Alas it was true. On this Monday many years after that almost glorious night in Vancouver, Nastia’s exhibition is a sad reminder of that Russian judge's words of soft American. Nastia still gave it her all even though she was unable to persuade even a squeak from her arm. By the time she’d moved on to her legs, she’d lost the crowd and those you were left to watch could only shake their heads and wonder about what greatness had eluded the leader of the former Arm and Leg fart queens of America. /