Though I am many things, I never will be Mrs. Suzie Homemaker, queen of domesticity who cooks in heels and has her initially monogrammed on all of her aprons and generally makes all women look bad. I am the girl who hasn't met an oven yet that could resist burning me, actually called the Jell-O company in the tenth grade to find out what I needed to set the stove on to boil water (not one of my finest moments) and generally is a disgrace to all women.
It doesn't help that I come from a family who would much rather go out to eat then cook a meal.We have been to pretty much every restaurant within a 35 miles radius of our house and probably know more waiters/waitresses/restaurant owners by name than it is ever okay to. They even put our picture up at one of our preferred local restaurants because we were such frequent customers. (I was in ninth grade, and my 15-year-old self like so didn't think it was cool. My 22-year-old self, on the other had, thinks it's hilarious. My how I have evolved.)
I think people have picked up on this lack of womanly skills if our wedding gifts are any indication-I got a whole bunch of cookbooks, most of which contain the word "easy" in the title. So lately I have been trying to find the dormant Paula Dean that I am sure resides somewhere deep in my soul. I have had several successful cooking ventures, which Mark either seemed to like or just said he did so that I would stop asking him "what do you think?" every 30 seconds while I watched him eat.
The other day, I decided I wanted to fry up some okra. I looked up the recipe and it seemed reasonable enough, so after getting all of the supplies at the grocery, I got to work. Turns out you about have to have six arms to fry okra- one set to bread them with, one set to put them in the fryer and one to get them into a bowl, so I enlisted Mark's help. While I oversaw the frying process, I tasked him with the breading process.
I was concentrating so hard that I didn't see exactly what happened that led to the thud I heard next. I looked over to see the full contents of a bowl of cornmeal/flour mix on the floor, with Mark standing over the white cloud of flour fog that was starting to rise as he launched into a string of obscenities. I silently handed him the broom, and he swept up the mess still cursing grumpily.
Five minutes and another thud later, Mark had somehow managed to dump a second whole bowl of cornmeal and flour onto the floor. As I looked from and irate and powder-covered Mark, to the disaster on the floor, it took all I had to not burst out laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation. But Mark was still in that phase of not finding it amusing in the least.
"I think...we've made...enough okra," Mark aid through clenched teeth. So in a dust cloud of flour we ate our okra in silence, me trying not to laugh and Mark throwing dirty looks at the pile of breading still on the floor. Luckily I got Mark to laugh about it later, but I think that is the last time we will be making fried okra.
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