There's gratitude in here, if you squint real hard and look at it from far away

Do you know what this is? Do you?

THIS is what my kitchen likes when I decide that I am, after all, the second coming of the Barefoot Contessa, AND THEN decide to "whip up" her recipe for chicken stew with biscuits for dinner tonight.

The thing is, I LOVE the Barefoot Contessa. Love her. I own three of her cookbooks and long for the day that Zoey will nap for a three hour stretch at the same time The Food Network decides to air a marathon running of her show. The reality of my life is that I caught a 5-minute snipet of her show this morning before giving in to Zoey's incessant whining for the choo-choo show, remembered that I had recently purchased her newest cookbook at Costco a couple weeks ago, and decided to peruse the contents as I sucked down my morning coffeee.

And I, with monthly hormones coursing through my veins, lit upon the recipe for Chicken Stew with Biscuits and found myself dreaming of comfort-food heaven.

The recipe is essentially chicken pot pie filling covered with biscuits instead of pie crust, and it looked DIVINE. One of the things I love about Ina Garten is that she sticks to fairly basic ingredients (pounds of butter, anyone?) and her recipes are, in general, not impossible to follow. (Unlike Martha Stewart, whom I have given up on due to her constant combining of weird and hard to find ingredients and complicated recipes. Lemon cheese curd shortbread? I think not.)

The odds of accomplishing a new recipe, simple or not, were not in my favor this morning. Bryan decided to head to Puyallup for the day to work on our new house, leaving me at home with a whiny, cranky toddler. I needed to do major grocery shopping at (*sigh*) Winco. However, one of my major faults happens to be my uncanny ability to ignore the Voice of Fate, so Zoey and I were soon bundled up and off to Winco.

Loyal followers of my blog remember my extreme distaste for grocery shopping at Winco, which is why I typically prepare a painstaking list (complete with coupons) and send Bryan off to do the shopping every Sunday. The work that needs to be done on our new house in Puyallup has meant that Bryan is not around much on weekends lately, and this has left Zoey and I to fight our way through the claustrophobic aisles of my least favorite store. And while there are few things I hate more than watching a fat-ass in her Mountain Dew flannel pajama pants load up a cart with any pork product she can get her hands on in the meat department, the fact remains that shopping at Winco saves us plenty of money every week in groceries.

Zoey was in a particularly foul mood this morning as we selected our shopping cart and I began the process of cramming a crying, wriggly two year old in to the seat. The tears lasted clear through the produce aisle, at which point she ramped it up a bit and started sobbing "nigh-nigh, Mommy! Nigh-nigh!". You want to go to sleep? Seriously? And yet she persistently pointed to my shoulder, begging to be lifted out of the cart. "You want to go night night on Mommy's shoulder?" "YEAH!". Hmmm. As I lifted her out of the cart and felt her curl against my body, I discovered what was likely the source of her crankiness--she was hot and feverish. Awesome. Because Winco is the PERFECT place to discover that your child has a fever.

I somehow managed to navigate a stubborn cart and a somewhat-sick toddler through the remainder of the store and made it out to the car in relatively good time.

Once home, with groceries unloaded, I packed Zoey off for a much-needed nap, after checking her temperature. (Low-grade fever at 99.0. Hopefully something a nap might fix? Can you spike a fever from pure exhaustion?)

And then...it was my time in the kitchen.

First of all, I had read through the list of ingredients (obviously) before heading to Winco, and decided to substitute some of Bryan's homegrown parsnips for two of the carrots in the recipe. Parsnips (for those of you who don't know) (and for those of you who do, just indulge me for a second) are these wonderful white veggies that look an awful lot like carrots, and even crunch like carrots...but they're sweeter and very, very yummy. Unfortunately for me, they were still parked firmly in the garden. After calling my husband for directions as to how I might go about locating and digging up these treasures, I headed out to the back yard in the soggy grey weather to dig me some parsnips!

(Note: I AM NOT A GARDENER. I leave that task solely to my husband. The extent of my gardening skills this year included picking ripe tomatoes off the vine, and after that, I'm out. The tops of the parsnips looked like weeds to me.)

Bryan had warned me I might have to use "something" to dig the veggies out of the ground, but I figured, how tough can it be? I mean, if they're like carrots, carrots come out of the ground easily...right?

So there I was, squatting in the mud, with my daughter's plastic straight-from-the-$1.99-bin-at-Target shovel, FIGHTING with the damn parsnips to please, please release themselves from the earth. My five minutes of struggling yielded one medium sized as well as two rather puny parsnips, 10 fingers covered in mud, and 10 fingernails now desperately in need of a scrubbing.

I was off to a great start.

Ina, I love you, but this recipe I chose was more difficult than I had bargained for. Lots of chopping, blanching, sauteing, combining, and mixing, all of which required the use of every single pot and pan I own.

Fortunately, and here's the gratitude part, I love to cook and find being in my kitchen a very peaceful experience. I am even a little grateful for the tight quarters, as this allowed me to continue constantly stirring what would be my pot-pie gravy while reaching across the room to pull a clean spoon out of the drawer. (But even I could live without cleaning by hand every heavy pan that lives in my cupboard.) I may not know a carrot top from a weed in the ground, but I can take those carrots and whatever else you throw me and whip up a kick-ass pot-pie, Barefoot Contessa style!

Anyway. With the ingredients (finally) assembled and in the refrigerator, I managed to sit down and relax on the couch for all of two minutes before I could hear Zoey talking to herself in her bedroom. When I went to get her up, I discovered she was hotter (much hotter) than she had been when I layed her down. And her big, brown eyes had that glassy look to them that she always develops when she's getting sick. Sure enough, her temperature was up to 101 degrees. Great.

So we BOTH relaxed with a continuous stream of pre-recorded episodes of Mr. Rogers on TV, with Zoey zoning out on my lap as I read the Anthony Bourdain book I am completely in love with over the top of her head.

And my dinner? Was fabulous. Totally worth all the hard work! The biscuits...yummy. I want to make more tomorrow, although I am afraid that while I am on lockdown with a feverish toddler, this could mean disaster for my waistline. (Zoey took one lick of gravy off one piece of chicken and opted instead for Raisin Bran. These are the nights that I particularly wish I didn't spend so much time preparing great food for myself and a pint-sized underdeveloped pallate.)

And now, I have to go call in to work and leave a message about my absence tomorrow, as my guilty conscience just can not bear the idea of waking Zoey up at 6 a.m., doping her up on ibuprofen, and sending her to preschool, hoping for the best. (It does not help that, in her very verbal current state, she can actually say to me "no work, Mommy...home!", and shoot me that sad, sad glassy-brown-eyed look that always melts me, no matter what.)

Here's hoping I don't go insane tomorrow!