The day after you have tried hard enough for long enough and you’re sitting instead of standing is not the day to make dinner complicated. I would recommend thinking about a sandwich or packaged popcorn.
Last night after little sleep and barely treading water in a sea of how to make something from nothing that I swim in over and over again with never enough safety equipment, I thought I had it in me to make dinner in the 20 minutes that I had left before dark started to creep in and the ice cream man could potentially drive away from his post at the river.
I smashed the potatoes, steamed the asparagus just long enough, remembered to slice the chicken breasts in half along their sides so that they would cook in the pan, but got in a fight over homework right in the middle of making soffritto of finely minced onion, carrot and celery with whole cloves of garlic and sprigs of parsley over high heat.
I tried to stay out of it and mind my business of looking for rosemary in the garden for the sauce that the soffritto was supposed to turn into and basil leaves in the fridge for the marinade meant for the asparagus but I was a four hundred pounder with a fear of falling balanced on a skinny twig meant for a lean squirrell on the run. It all burned up and there was nothing to do but eat it anyway.
I hate homework, and as a four hundred pounder I don’t belong anywhere near it. I made Ferdinand eat the chicken, but I told him from here on in, he can do his homework however he pleases, without the involvement of a grizzly.