Due to circumstances beyond my control, I have been forced to stop eating take-out for lunch and now have to eat my own cooking. As I'm a fairly good cook, this isn't exactly an ordeal, but the clean-up promises to be. You see, I can start cooking just fine, but it is a little difficult to stop once I'm going. This weekend (my job is three days on, three days off, making my weekend a roving holiday of sorts that bears no particular relationship to the weeks of other people) for instance, I decided on a whim to make just about everything I knew how to make, all at once, given the constraints of the ingrediants at hand. For instance, my spaghetti marina was quickly modified to include italian sausage, and I served it over bread instead of pasta. The beef stroganoff was just a mushroom gravy that I later added cream to, and my chicken a la king I had to guess at, since I only made it once out of a recipe book. I ran out of pots, pans, and space on my stove quickly enough, but it wasn't until the first dishes were ready to be packaged up that I realized I didn't have any containers to put them in.

I do things like that a lot. In fact, something like this is pretty typical on my "Sautrday."

Walmart came to the rescue, but only after most of the dishes spent the night in my refrigerator still in the pan they'd been cooked in. A least the desert came out well. Granted, it is pretty tough to screw up an apple pie, but the honey cream was a bit trickier.

When it was all over, I looked at the tower of stainless steel dominating my nice kitchen, I suddenly remembered why, unless I have to impress some boy or another, I stick to eating snacks at home. That way I only have to cook, thus wash pans, once a week.

Everyone, beware. This is the fate that awaits those of you independant enough to want your own place yet not afluent enough to afford either dishwasher or maid (or are roommates/partners with a very nice person who does dishes for free and possibly a little sex).