Friday, August 19, 2016

Ensalada de atún

Saturday night supper was tuna salad.  Darla and I were on as the cooks.  Neither of us wanted to miss meeting, so we devised a plan by which we could get everything done in between the meetings, possibly just needing to pop out of the last meeting a little early to get things finished up.  We set about making that happen, chopping all the vegetables and measuring all our dry ingredients in the morning.  Between the second and third meetings, we worked like crazy to get things cooked so they could be put together at the last minute and served.  As meeting time neared, it became very apparent that we were not going to make it.  So be it.  Mom went to meeting, and Darla and I kept working.  We worked like mad during the entire meeting, unable to even take a break to listen over the speaker in the back room of the kitchen.  We cooked and mixed and made tea and dirtied EVERY SINGLE pot in the kitchen.  It was a race against time, and there were moments when we wondered if we would win.  As the last hymn was being sung in the meeting building, we were frantically mixing gigantic pots of tuna salad on the floor of the kitchen because we couldn't get enough leverage if we left them on the counter.  Food was escaping in the process, and when we finally whisked the pots to the table just as everyone was filing into the dining hall, the floor was littered with carrots and peas and noodles and little pieces of tuna.  The sinks were full of dirty dishes.  The back room where the stoves are located, were filled with sticky, gooey, black on the bottom pots.  It was, in short, rather a disaster zone.  Mom came in and took one look at it all and asked, "Why do you have food on the floor?"  Thinking she was referring to the pots in which we had stirred the tuna salad, I responded, "We had nowhere else to put it."  When she informed me that she had been referring to the little pieces littering the floor everywhere, we laughed and laughed and laughed.  We certainly didn't have time to take pictures of any part of the process, but a few good mental pictures remain!  

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