“Exsqueeze me!” “You’re Exsqueezed”

Libby Dulski

11/13/16

The Perfect Meal

“Exsqueeze me!” “You’re Exsqueezed”

“Noah, would you sit down? Everyone’s waiting to eat dinner.” Noah’s father Tim said as he eyed the stir fry in front of him. He was probably wondering if it would poison him, send him running to the bathroom, or even cause him to never speak to me again.

            Noah walked slowly into the dining room with two open Stellas in hand. He was the last to sit down at the table at which six of the eight seats were occupied. That is correct, I cooked for six freaking people. And not just any six people, I cooked for Noah (my boyfriend), Noah’s parents (no pressure?), Noah’s two sisters Emma and Lena, and Lena’s boyfriend Matt. The six of us sat around a cherry wood table in an aqua blue dining room, at Noah’s house, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Oh, and a puppy, Millie, sat underneath the table. A few minutes earlier “Hard” by Rihanna was blasting over the sound system in the kitchen as Noah, Emma, and I finished preparing dinner, and Matt and Lena set the table. I had never been in this home before, let alone cooked for all of these people. Yet I found that I was surprisingly comfortable with the gas stove (just like the one at my own house), and I adapted easily using whatever pots and pans I could unearth. Everyone was also more than willing to help prepare the meal (except for the parents of course, I did not want them near the kitchen for I was far too nervous that I would stab someone with a knife or set the kitchen on fire).

            Noah sat down next to me and gave me one of the beers in his hand as German “thank-yous” were quickly exchanged before people started to eat their meals. A giant bowl of rice the size of a soccer ball sat in the middle of the table; made from the Nishiki Japanese sticky-rice I grew up with.

“So this election went to shit didn’t it? Libby could you pass the salad?” Noah said.

Beside the rice was a smaller bowl of Thai salad with peanut dressing. The salad consisted of shredded cabbage, grated carrots, red bell peppers, cucumber, edamame, scallions, and cilantro. All of this was mixed with a peanut dressing made from creamy peanut butter, rice vinegar, lime juice, vegetable oil, soy sauce, honey, sugar, garlic cloves, ginger, salt, red pepper flakes, and cilantro leaves.

“I honestly think that you should do study abroad Noah, I think you will regret it if you don’t. Also can you hand me a napkin?” Dorothea, Noah’s mother, said while motioning towards the stack of cartoon turkey napkins.

The best part of the meal was the red 14-inch skillet that was sitting towards the head of the table. Filled with a whole red and white onion, two green bell peppers, one yellow pepper, two red peppers, a whole package of mushrooms, three handfuls of sugar snap peas, and a third of a cup of canola oil to let the veggies cook. It also contained a half bottle of teriyaki stir fry sauce and chicken; however, the chicken was added last and a single vegetarian plate was prepared for Emma before the chicken was mixed into the skillet of vegetables.

“Can we play Monopoly after dinner? Or Apples to Apples? Oh man, let’s play Uno!” Emma said with a full mouth.

“We can’t play Uno; it ruins lives. It rips friendships apart and it destroys moral; the draw four card always gets me!” Matt responded.

For dessert, there were three batches of a dozen cookies piled onto a platter. My signature “crack cookies” used four sticks of butter, two cups of white granulated sugar, another cup of brown sugar, baking soda, salt, five cups of flower, vanilla extract, four eggs, and four freaking cups of semi-sweet chocolate chips.

            A few hours earlier Noah and I had driven to Arbor Farms Market to pick up all of the ingredients for the meal and dessert. Arbor Farms is like a local version of Whole Foods Market. The small grocery store sells local and organic produce like fresh Michigan grass-fed beef, pork, lamb, and poultry. We hit up that fresh poultry section and picked out two pounds of boneless breast and rib meat. From the chicken to the stir fry sauce, everything that we bought for the meal came from Arbor Farms Market and it all cost a total of about $70. For feeding six people, it is not a bad price. (Except the beer, the beer was not from Arbor Farms; it was supplied by the parental units.)

            Even before heading to Arbor Farms, Noah and I had taken the 350 Wolverine train from Kalamazoo to Ann Arbor; we needed a proper kitchen for this meal and not a dinky college kitchen. On the two hour and eight-minute train ride, we had prepared a list of ingredients we needed to gather for our “perfect meal.”

            Was this meal perfect? Stir fry, a Thai salad, a ton of rice, a mountain of cookies, and a decent amount of beer, does this measure out to perfection? Well, when we made the cookies they were too doughy; Emma got cookie dough all over her stomach (she claims that Lena put it there; correction, she does not claim, she knows). The cookies were supposed to take ten minutes to bake per batch, the second batch took over an hour… we forgot to close the freaking oven. Only two people ate the Thai salad, but at least everyone ate the stir fry (Noah’s parents included thank goodness). And everyone had at least half their weight in cookies.

            So, I would not say this was the best meal I had ever cooked, but it was definitely one of the most fun meals to prepare. Emma cut all of the onions for me and only cried a little, Noah was a professional pepper chopper even though he tended to leave a bunch of seeds, and Matt and Lena did a stellar job getting cookie dough all over the floor (but do not fret, puppy Millie saved the day and lapped up any dropped pepper pieces and sugar grains). Thank goodness the chicken cooked all the way through and was not dry, and praise the lord the stir fry came together nicely courtesy of a team effort. I would also like to give the stereo system in the kitchen a gold star for being a life saver, as we were bunkered down in kitchen for about two hours, Britney and Rihanna continuously saved our moral as we fretted over the state of the cookies.

            But a year from now I probably will not remember how I burnt the bottom layer of the rice, or how the stir fry was a little too strongly flavored like teriyaki, or how some of the cookies were a tad burnt. However, I will remember how Lena kept asking to play Monopoly, and how Dorothea’s smile made me feel more confident about the meal, and I will never forget the devastation and hysterical laughter that followed after realizing we had left the oven open a crack.