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Monday, This Must Be Chicken

I am an individual who finds comfort in routines. This is quite a different perspective than my wife had *before* we got married. Whereas in my childhood, things were very predictable and reliable, in my wife's home, most decisions were made on the spur of the moment. Initially in our marriage, this disparity in terms of routines and the desire for them, created several moments of friction in our lives. However, over the years, we have both grown more towards the middle ground in our former perspectives.

Meals for instance. My wife's family would often not know or have any idea about what would be had for dinner until my wife's mother would arrive home from work and start looking around in the cupboards and pantry to scramble something together very quickly. In my own family, we typically sat down after dinner on Thursday to create a menu for the week, which would then allow for the development of a grocery list that evening as well for use while shopping on Friday. We would plan out each and every meal and have it posted in the kitchen so we could re-examine it anytime we wished. To me it was wonderfully comforting to know precisely what we were to eat each meal.

In our household now, we have developed a chimeric blend of these two disparate perspectives. Yet, the flavor of both remain and have even been enhanced. In our home, we do plan weekly menus for every meal, and we do collaboratively put together the grocery list for the week. And, we have had success enough that we have even developed repetitive day "themes" that we adhere to most weeks.... Monday is chicken, Wednesday is Mexican, Thursday we dine out, Saturday we have soup and Sunday we have a "gourmet" dinner we make from a cookbook. Yet, there is a bit of the flavor of the unpredictability from my wife's childhood in the aspect that we purposefully leave certain of the side dishes in our meal open for "experimentation". This past Sunday, for instance, we made a gourmet form of Stuffed Peppers. The basic recipe had rice, kidney beans, diced tomatoes, shredded carrots, olives, corn, peas, basil, oregano, and garlic. Yet, for a side we had a vegetable enhanced cous-cous that I created using carrots, celery, broccoli, peppers, peppercorns, curry, ginger, onion, raisins (and of course, cous-cous). It was a wonderful dish and it complemented the stuffed peppers wonderfully. But, it was a semi-spur of the moment creation. It was not something that we would have typically been able to plan. It was a delightful concoction and it was enjoyed so completely, I tried to write down my recipe in case we wish to make it again.

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