I’d like to tell you a little story.
On Monday, I went to Burbank to see a taping of the Ellen Show. I’ve been wanting to see her for years and it’s just about impossible to get tickets. I got tickets because I went to see a taping of the Bethenny Show 2 summers ago when it was taping previews here. Part of the perk of attending was to get 2 tickets to see Ellen. So that’s how it happened folks. Good luck with your tickets. But that’s not the story.
The fact that I was going to be gone all afternoon meant that I made sure to leave my oldest daughter, Temera, ingredients to prepare dinner. Monday morning I went to the market and bought chicken, pasta, and lemon since she’s been wanting to make lemon chicken pasta since last week. I thought this would be the perfect day for her to cook since the taping started at 4pm and I had no idea if I would even be home for dinner.
Turns out, Ellen is such a pro that the taping only lasted one hour. Seriously… she was on it… no re-takes or anything. One hour start to finish. Awesome. So, we were out of there by 5pm and I was pretty happy that I would make it home by about 6pm and dinner would be ready and waiting for me. I couldn’t have planned it more perfectly.
When I started heading home, I called Temera to let her know I was on my way. Suddenly, she started whining about having to make dinner. Huh? She said she was having too much fun outside with her friends and she didn’t want to cook dinner. “Can we go out?”
“Out? I thought you wanted to make dinner? I bought all the ingredients.”
“We can have it tomorrow night.”
Ugh. I drove home and we ended up getting pizza. And crazy bread. Because that’s how we roll.
Bored yet? Wait! The best is still to come.
Tuesday comes. I figure that since I have all that chicken in the fridge, I better go ahead and make the lemon chicken pasta. I go to the fridge, take out the chicken and kind of stop in my tracks. Foster Farms. Damn. Wasn’t there something about salmonella? A recall?
Being the concientious mother that I am, I head for my computer and Google “Foster Farms chicken recall” and scour the article until I see three inspection numbers to check on my chicken package. Oh great… I happen to have a salmonella-ridden package of chicken. The article says that if you cook the chicken properly, you’ll be okay. Hmmm…. I’m not so sure. Serve tainted chicken to my family? Not going to happen.
So, I ended up making the lemon chicken pasta without the chicken. That made it just lemon pasta. Not very exciting. Pretty boring dinner, in fact.
But…
My family is still alive. Nobody is sick. Salmonella… you aren’t welcome in my home.
And the moral of the story? Because I was gone all day at the Ellen Show which caused Temera to have to cook dinner, which she ended up not doing and we had to order pizza…. I was able to leave the chicken until Tuesday when I caught that it was the tainted chicken and hence… didn’t feed it to my family. Had I been home to make dinner on Monday, who knows if I would have noticed those nasty inspection numbers. I might have killed my family.
So Ellen. THANK YOU. Thank you for the show tickets and for saving my family.
