MY CHOICE IS EITHER/OR - BUT THERE WAS A THIRD CHOICE

 I suddenly realized that it was Wednesday night and I had no thought on what to write about.  Then the mess presented itself.  

First, I should explain that I am a rather picky eater so many nights I cook a completely separate dinner for myself from that which I cook for husband.  I mostly have set dinners to cook for me when I don't like a particular food he wants for dinner – for example, on Monday nights he has hot dogs and beans for dinner.  I can no longer eat hot dogs (due to getting sick after doing so once) and I don't like/eat beans.  So on Monday nights I make myself a chicken patty and rice left over from Chinese takeout – sometimes with a gravy, tomato sauce or left over chow mein vegetables.   Not a big deal.

But tonight it got sooooo much worse.  First there was dinner.  Husband was having smoked sausage with left over mu shoo chicken (see even our choices in Chinese takeout are very different) and some rice.  I had a boneless chicken breast with leftover pasta and added peas.  So to start with, after I cooked the kitchen was full of used pots in addition to our dishes, etc.  Not a problem, normally we watch TV (in the kitchen) and when he goes upstairs after the weather report at 11:20 pm I do the dishes.  Not a big deal.

We had discussed today having a chicken stew that we like for dinner tomorrow.  The plan was to cook the chicken tonight (2.5 hours) and then tomorrow afternoon I would take it off the bone and use the meat and broth to cook the stew.  Husband knew this was the plan and that I would be cooking the chicken after we ate dinner, and while we were watching TV.

Husband still had in the freezer a package of ½ pound of ham, left from the ham we cooked for New Year's Day dinner and had taken it out and put it in the fridge to make ham salad.  It never dawned on me that he planned to do this tonight after dinner – but that was his plan.  So the chicken had to wait.  

The sink was mostly full with the dishes from tonight and we had used both of our 2 quart pots, both of of our 1.5 quart pots and both of our 1 qt pots.  A lot to wash, but it did not bother me.   

I was about to go and take out the chicken to simmer for tomorrow's stew when husband told me that he was going to make his ham salad.  I looked around the kitchen at the lack of space (we have a rather small kitchen) and knew that if he had this idea in his head, we were going to make his ham salad “now”.  

I had to find the small food processor we have – and had forgotten completely about as we never used it until he decided to make ham salad Spring 2020 after we made a ham for Easter.  I found it.  The had to find the other items he needed to make it.  Remember, I said at the start of this post that I am picky eater, well there are foods that I don't even look at, let alone touch and one of them is any kind of meat salad or anything else with mayonnaise – or even mayonnaise on its own – and you know who is going to be cleaning all of this up.  He made his ham salad and while he was finishing up and putting it in a plastic container, I started the chicken cooking.

So now our kitchen sink had the assorted cooking and eating items from dinner, the equipment he used to make his ham salad and was overfull already.  

I left the chicken simmering while we finished watched TV.  I then had to start washing what was in the sink – which had to come out of the sink to do so.  Washing up done – even the terribly icky (to me) equipment used to make his ham salad and from heating his mu shoo.  

Then the garbage question.  If we leave the remnants  of the ham and other items from dinner in the kitchen they will get smelly in the garbage.  Tonight is one of the one the nights we can put out garbage for the morning – so it goes out tonight or sits either in the house or our large garbage can outside.  Which one?  The amount of garbage in the bag/pail is maybe 20% of the capacity at most  - probably less.  Which would you do – waste the rest of the bag or have smelly garbage – and I should mention that the style of bag I like (with twist ties) is getting harder and harder to find – in addition to being a general waste of the plastic bag to put it out so empty?

Aha!  I can almost always find another choice to a problem.  I took the matching sized bag of paper garbage from our office downstairs and dumped it into the kitchen bag, which filled the kitchen bag which could to out for pickup without wasting the bag.  I have another bag of the same size in our paper shredder which is just about full – so tomorrow after I pull apart the chicken for the stew, I can throw the bones and other icky parts into the replacement kitchen garbage bag and then dump into that bag the shredder's bag which should just about fill it – and then put that full bag in our outside can to take out of same and leave at the curb on Sunday night for Monday pickup.  I will have filled and used a new bag in the kitchen, and will need yet another one for the kitchen, but I will be able to continue to use the 2 bags in the office until they are full again.  Problem solved.  

The chicken finished cooking since I started writing this post and I have put it in a plastic container to deal with tomorrow and its liquid in a separate plastic container.  I have not yet dealt with the pot and utensils from cooking the chicken – they are soaking and will be washed when I do the wash up from our late night snack, so I have to chance to breath – until I need to go downstairs and change loads of laundry which are washing in the basement.  (Wednesday night is first laundry night, followed by finishing of same on Thursday night.)

THOUGHT OF THE WEEK -

When confronted with two choices and neither one of them works – look for a third and maybe even a fourth choice. Don't presume that the situation is “either or”.  Often there is another or several other choices that one has not thought of before.  In this case I managed to find a solution so I don't have smelly garbage in my kitchen while also not wasting a plastic bag by putting it out without it being filled.