yesterday's dinner

Yesterday, we chowed down on salmon steaks and shrimp. The shrimp came to us courtesy of Mom's good friends the other day; the salmon was an archeological find, discovered in the recesses of one of our freezers and brought back to life.

I had made a huge pile of five-cheese macaroni the other day, so that was one of our side dishes. A large salad completed the ensemble.

The salmon and shrimp got about the same treatment: a sauté in butter and olive oil, plus a sprinkling of salt, pepper, and garlic. The shrimp also got an extra sprinkling of Old Bay, with a "spicy" seafood dipping sauce (it wasn't that spicy to me, but Dad claimed it was mighty spicy) on the side. The macaroni, which already had chunks and flakes of crispy bacon on it, received no extra adornments.

Mom saw the mound of food on her plate and said, "Wow!" when I placed it in front of her. True-- she says "Wow" a lot, almost reflexively, when she receives her meals from me; in this case, however, she was gawking at the sheer size of what had landed on her TV tray. But as Yoda said, "Size matters not": Mom demolished her meal as thoroughly as she would have demolished a smaller-sized dish. The salad came out separately, and it met the same fate.

Dad also seemed to find the meal special. Sitting at our new bar, he remarked, "I feel like I'm eating at a restaurant somewhere." I was happy to receive the compliment, but I knew the truth: salmon isn't that hard to cook, the mac-and-cheese were merely reheated from the other day, and the little shrimplings needed barely any help at all, as they'd been pre-cooked. It was less a matter of cooking than of putting prepped meal components together.

Tasted good, though.


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