The girl makes dinner

I don't have a dishwasher. Like most people, I hate washing dishes. I have been cooking a lot more lately. All of these things came together tonight into a huge pile of dishes and no desire to cook a whole meal.

I had Curried Noodles with Veggies on the menu tonight, but I also had a lot of leftover Curried Fruited Couscous from my vegetarian potluck at work today. I mean, a LOT of leftover couscous. We have not had a huge group lately, so I made a bunch so that we would be sure to have plenty of food for those of us who did come. We did have a relatively big group of people show up today, though--a total of 9 people, and everyone brought a lot of good food. I didn't think another curried pasta dish would be a good thing to make, even though they are pretty different recipes. They are too close for a lot of leftovers at once.

So, when we got home, I asked the kids what they wanted for dinner. Predictably, they both said pizza. This sounded like a good plan to me, since it didn't involve the stove top, which was disturbingly full of dirty dishes (I am short on counter space in my kitchen, so the stove top does double duty). Even better, the girl volunteered the information that she could make the pizza herself. I started on the mound of dishes, and she got to work. Our shredded soy cheese was no good, but I had slices of Tofutti cheese in mozzarella and American flavors, and she was thrilled to be given a knife to cut the cheese to scatter on the pizza. The boy snacked on golden raisins, and both kids had extra slices of cheese during the prep time. After the pizza went in the oven, I had an appetizer of the couscous. I watched over the baking while working on the dish mountain as the girl impressed her brother with her Spiderman video game playing skills.

The pizza turned out really yummy. We all really enjoyed it, and I think we could have made a significant dent in a second one if it had been available. It was really nice to have my daughter make the dinner tonight, mostly. I need to go tell her how much I appreciate it before she goes to sleep.