In which she returns to her poor, neglected kitchen

O, how well I remember this room! The sink, a concave foundation for towers of dirty dishes, each one boasting the remnants of past meals! Once these dishes were delicious, homemade things, but these days it’s not unlikely to find knives crusted with frozen pizza sauce or seven bowls with corresponding spoons bearing evidence of granola – eaten for breakfast, lunch or dinner. Other people’s dishes have found their way into this sink, having been emptied of their tasty gifts and left at the edge of the counter, waiting mournfully to be cleaned and returned to the kindly lands from whence they came.

The oven, recently replaced, has been left to collect crumbs from cheese sandwiches, assembled in a hurry on the stovetop after the counter became cluttered beyond use. We have reheated some things in this oven, and I have made batches of granola every so often, if only to keep myself dimly familiar with this kitchen and what it does. For the most part, though, this oven remains cold, unused.

Alas!

This week, I couldn’t take it anymore. There are still stacks of dishes in the sink, but now they bear the battle scars of a “zesty” edamame salad, Orangette’s Busy Day Cake, topped with Artisan Sweets’ Balsalmic Strawberries and, due to my inability to follow a recipe combined with the bare bones state of our cupboards, a dish I like to call “lemony tuna casserole with elements of potato ham bake,” though one couldn’t help noticing that neither lemon, tuna, potato nor ham made an actual appearance in the dish.

Delicious.