Astoundingly Messy

I have always been amazed at how messy Bryan is in the kitchen. He does most of the cooking around this house (okay, let’s be honest here: he pretty much does all the cooking around this house!) and somehow manages to use pretty much EVERY pot and/or pan in the house every time he makes a meal. We have an unspoken agreement between us = he does the cooking and I do the cleaning up afterwards. I’m not complaining at all: he’s a great cook, and I am not. But come on, really? Every pot?

Just the other day, however, I finally met his match.

Cousin Bob and his girlfriend Meg came down from Fairbanks last weekend for a Pickle Ball Tournament in Eagle River. Bob asked if it would be okay for him to take over my kitchen one night so that he could cook dinner for everyone as a way of saying Thank You for letting them crash in our bunk room. Well, who would say no to that? The meal he decided to make for us was a scrumptious Shrimp Scampi with Angle Hair Pasta. While he cooked that, Meg made a Mixed Green Salad with Roasted Beets.

We put the invitation out to the family and got RSVPS from both Noel & Hank and Laurel & her kids. Reed had thought he might come for a visit, but he is still recovering from a rather nasty surgery on his nose/throat so ended up not joining us after all. Mother even stayed up for dinner – she’s normally in bed well before 6:30, so that was a pretty big deal for her.

I actually had to sit on my hands as I watched those two at work, just to keep myself from tidying up while they did their thing. They had so many dishes and pots and pans and containers and measuring spoons and glasses and cups and ingredients and knives and who knows what strewn all over the kitchen from one end to the other.  Poor mother was just beside herself, stressing over it all.

But oh my gosh – how good it was! Really a great meal, made all the better by having such good company to share it with. And, since I am the “cleaner” I told them to just sit back and relax afterwards. I washed some of the pans by hand, ran three (3) loads in the dishwasher, and spent about a day and a half tidying up!

The more I think about it, the more I think that they might actually have Bryan beat.