Rememberance of Dinners Past

Last night I made a usual Sunday night dinner: roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy and (sigh) frozen corn. (The Mister LOVES frozen corn...it's the only vegetable he asks for. I don't get it.) I rather like roasted chicken, and since the oven is on anyway, I'd have chosen roasted potatoes, but Himself gets all droopy with disappointment if there is no mashed potatoes to go with gravy. And as I don't make gravy all that often, I guess I can make the poor man happy and smash a few spuds to go with it. To make myself happier, I also made roasted butternut squash. I love squash, but the rest of my family only puts up with it....luckily, she who does the cooking decides the menu, so butternut it is!

(Just in case you want to know: peel and chunk up a butternut squash, put it in a baking dish with a bit of butter and brown sugar and chuck it into the oven for the same amount of time as the chicken. When it's all soft and the edges have browned up a bit, bash it around a bit with a tablespoon or two of cream or evaporated milk until it's kind of smoothish, and try not to eat it all right out of the baking dish before it gets to the table.)

While I was making the gravy and mashing the potatoes (with some help from Thing 2, who is a very enthusiastic masher and stirrer) I put the squash back into the cooling oven, just to carve out a bit more counter space in the mad flurry that is the "end of the meal prep" frenzy. I nuked the corn and some lima beans (Thing 2 adores lima beans. And she dislikes cake. I'm pretty sure she's an alien.) and flung the whole delicious meal on the table, where we devoured everything like we were at a UN refugee camp and the supply plane had finally arrived.

This morning I opened the oven to make meringues, and lo and behold, I found the squash from last night.

After staring at it in disbelief with my jaw hanging open and my whole brain convulsing with the task of making sense of it all, I pulled it out of the oven and stared at it some more. How could I have missed that???? (I have doen this sort of thing before....once I opened the BBQ for the first time in the season only to find a dessicated baked potato that had been left on the grill since the previous autumn. Yummy.)

Eventually, I gave it a taste, declared it fit for human consumption, and made soup out of it. (Sauteed some shallots, dumped in the squash with a bit of ground ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon and chicken broth that was in the fridge and pureed the whole lot.) It was delicious.

I'm not sure when your brain farts are considered serious enough to be called dementia or Alzheimers, but I'll let you know when I find out. If I remember.