Vida. Risa. Amor.

I have been bored with food lately...I seemed to have lost my taste for spaghetti and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches so I thought I'd branch out and try and actually make something special since it was the kids last day of school. About a year ago I made these awesome steak kabobs for the family that required making a homemade marinade....they turned out perfect and my family loved them and left no leftovers. I don't know what happened to my kabob recipe yesterday but I have decided that from now on I am leaving the meat marinading, and grilling to my husband...who is an expert. As the kitchen manager of the Elephant Bar, he is always learning new recipes from their menu there and then cooks us delicious food at home....but this is kind of a problem since he works in a kitchen full time and he doesn't exactly like to cook on his days off. He's gifted though, and I always remind him if he wants to like what we eat at home, he kind of needs to take over the meat part of dinner! (I let him have the T.V. remote on these nights).

I don't really like to cook....no, actually, I think I hate to cook. I know I can prepare a meal, I do every day, but it's always the same typical meal that has a meat, a side dish, a vegetable, and possibly bread...(the pillsbury croissant kind). The kind of cooking I hate most is when you have to look in parts of the grocery store you've never seen before to find all the ingredients....and the worst is when you don't even know what a certain ingredient is, (what are shallots or orange zest anyway?)...or have to go buy a whole $10 on a spice you'll probably only use once.

So yesterday I thought I'd chop up my pot roast meat, instead of crock-potting it, and turn it into meat for the kabobs. (Mistake #1.) You really can't grill that kind of meat and then think you can actually chew it. My kids almost choked it was so tough. I thought that if I had everything marinade for a whole day that it would be okay...so not the case...and I also thought the more marinade the better. (Mistake #2). My husband needed goggles to keep the smoke out of his eyes when everything went on the grill. So altogether I probably spent about half an hour shopping for everything, 20 minutes on blending and mixing the marinade, 15 minutes cutting the meat into chunks, 10 minutes cutting the vegetables, another 30 minutes putting everything onto the freaking kabob sticks. (Mistakes #3, #4, #5, #6, & # 7). (Side note: wooden kabob sticks burn on the grill...and then scrape splinters of wood onto the meat for you to stab your mouth)...fun. (Mistake #8).

Kabobs are over rated. They look cute and organized, but they're a lot of work. It's too much effort to put all the meat and vegetables on the sticks without stabbing yourself, and then a lot of work to take them off and then more work to have to cut everything into bite size chunks for the kids to eat anyway. I told my family that I was sorry for making such a failure meal. Luckily I made two rice dishes and tortillas to go with everything. The moral of the story: always make delicious normal side dishes because they sometimes get turned into the main meal....then follow up with a great dessert like cookies and ice-cream.