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Cooking Up Excuses

Myth: Homedaddy does it all. Fact: Emma spends some of her mornings at daycare.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but there are certain things I can't accomplish while a pre-schooler is running amok experimenting with new personality combinations (Little Bo Peep-meets-Mike Tyson and Martha Stewart-meets-John Belushi have both shown promising results this week).

Housecleaning is impossible. Not just washing dishes and doing laundry, but the real rubber-glove stuff like scrubbing toilets, or opening those ancient containers of Mystery Leftovers that have been shunted to the back of the fridge. Children need the kind of love and attention you can't provide when you're genuflecting over the shower tile grout with a steel wool pad.

Hence, some daycare is in order. Which brings us to the heart of the matter. Myth: Homedaddy cleans the house while Emma is at daycare. Fact: Homedaddy does no such thing. Our house retains a look that a Beltway spin doctor might describe as "lived-in," although others might assume the entire premesis had been turned upside down and shaken.

With Emma at daycare, my normal reaction to household entropy is to start planning a dinner menu. The trick is to think of something that is just complicated enough to be successfully prepared, while leaving no time whatsoever for cleaning. If it's early in the day, and the house is in particularly bad shape, then dinner should be rather elaborate.

Yesterday I took one look at the dust-and-dog-hair tumbleweeds under the couch and was immediately inspired to poach a salmon.

Perhaps I set my sights too low, or perhaps I was too efficient at the fish counter; for whatever reason I found myself back home time to spare. I frantically consulted a cookbook and discovered, to my relief, that it would be a nice touch to poach the salmon in homemade fish stock rather than just water and seasonings. Homemade fish stock! Now that sounded time consuming. I was headed back to the market before you could say "disinfectant antifungal scrubbing bubbles."

I took my time selecting fish bones for stock, because quality is everthing, you know.

An hour or so later, with the dinner project under control, there was still the possibility I might have some time left to clean the house. Another frantic reading of the recipe yielded no further details. I tried another cookbook and hit paydirt. It mentioned in passing that some cooks prefer to wrap the salmon in cheesecloth before poaching, to make it easier to lift it out of the pan. Was this a necessary step? Since we had no cheesecloth on hand, the answer was a resounding Yes. Back to the market.

The cheesecloth turned out to be a good idea. The salmon was perfect. My only mistake was cooking too much of it. We'll be eating the leftovers for days.

Maybe Emma's had enough daycare this week ...

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© Todd Pinsky 1998-2002. All rights reserved.