Hello, dear HaQ readers. It’s Sunday afternoon – such a nice little pause in the week! Earlier, I did work that I intended to do and then took my two bouncy dogs for a very long walk. We all came back tired and content. We all fell asleep. What a wonderful thing it is to wake up from easy sleep so profound you forget for a moment why there’s a 3 on the clock when it’s still light out. And what day it is, anyway?  Oh yes. It is blissfully Sunday. Ahh.

Being Sunday, and late afternoon, it was time to think about Sunday dinner. I’m trying a new recipe; I often do on the weekend. It calls for letting the food season a while in the fridge. Uh oh. That’s when my game of kitchen leapfrog started. If your stuff is anything like mine, you’ll know what I mean when I say I had to empty the dishwasher to make some room in my fridge… Really.

On the cooking shows, the chef has approximately six acres of gleaming counter top to display a neat array of fourteen ingredients already measured and chopped and waiting. Mise en place. Stuff gets artistically strewn about a beautifully trussed chicken sitting like a miniature deity on a sheet pan. And the sheet pan is then slid smoothly into a refrigerator on its own completely empty shelf. Ta-da!

Uh-hunh. This is how it goes in my real life:

I know that the bird is supposed to season for a while. I open the fridge to assess the possibilities of pacing a sheet pan in there. Seriously? The chicken itself is laughing at me from its current perch and I eyeball what needs to change. This is where it gets real. In order to make room, I’m going to have to boot some of the seedier items that have outlasted their welcome. They’re all huddled in the back there, contemplating spiky tattoos that say “SPOILED ROTTEN” and conspiring to turn the butter. To evict them I’m going to need a pair of gloves and some room in the sink. To make room in the sink, the stuff in there needs to go in the dishwasher. Which still has clean dishes in it. Right.

So, in order for me to season a chicken, I had to empty the dishwasher, rinse and stow the dishes from the sink, pull the tossable stuff from the fridge, empty it into a trash bag, rinse the containers, get the trash ready to go out to the corner, and then finally rearrange the shelves in the fridge so a sheet pan would fit in there.

Yep. Real life. It’s a little fly-by-the-seat-of-your-sweatpants, but it’s lovely anyway. And there’s going to be a chicken dinner to prove it.

I hope your spring Sunday is a lovely day. I hope you have sunshine, and time for things you love, and an easy ride into the work week. For me – I have some kitchen rabble that needs to go to the corner trash bin, and then I think there is a glass of wine waiting for me while I wait for that chicken.  Cheers!

Stay tuned for more on the Here’s a Quarter blog next week! As always, your thoughts and comments are always welcome – they are moderated (I know – adulting again), so they may take a little while to appear, but I read them all and appreciate that you were here. Thank you!