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When Dinner Is a Bust...


Last night was one of those nights.  Yep, dinner totally flopped.  

I was trying a new recipe and it called for "lite Italian dressing" in the sauce.  Well, I didn't have any Italian dressing, so I whipped up some homemade.  But I made it with balsamic vinegar instead of white vinegar and that seems to have made the difference in this dish.  Or maybe it was the fact that the recipe needed store-bought dressing and I used homemade.  I'm not sure.  

I just know it was bad.  And since we had already bought lunch out that day I just couldn't justify going and buying more food out ...as bad as I wanted to!  

So we had a "snack dinner", which the kids love.  To me that means scrounging around the kitchen finding whatever you want to munch on.  To them it means plates full of things like lunch meat, cheeses, raw veggies, chips, crackers, etc, just nothing cooked.  Something like the one in this picture that my daughter had already been eating off of:


So ...bad meals happen and bad days happen, right?  It's what we do with them that makes the difference.  In the past a ruined meal could have ruined my evening (thus ruining everyone else's evening, too), but I have learned to just roll with it.  My family handled it well and didn't make a big deal out of it and that helped me to do the same.  

Today is a new day and I've got another dinner to make and another recipe to try!

Comments

Nicole said…
I have had a couple of those days!! Last year I didn't clean out the grill before I used it after winter. I had the most BEAUTIFUL pork chops on it, and some steamed rice and vegetables in the house. I glanced out and there were flames shooting out the top of the grill! I went out and the entire inside was engulfed in flames. You should have seen those pork chops! Hilarious! (Not so at the time.) I called my husband and said, "um, you might want to run through Wendy's and get us a few chicken sandwiches to go with our rice and veggies." So funny!

Another night I managed to destroy TWO dinners, so we gave up and went to Taco Bell.

And another time Dawson and I tried to make a Lentil casserole. We made a LOT in a 9x13 pan that we took one bite of and promptly dumped down the garbage disposal.
Kei said…
My kids love snacky dinners too :)
I have had those days...and usually ended up in tears while my kids snacked away in pure joy. (Who doesn't love snacky dinners!) My Little Miss just saw the pic of The Princesses' plate on my computer and said, "That's the perfect lunch!" Ha!

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