Hey Ma What’s For Dinner?

Like every other parent there are a few things during the course of my day that give me stress. The texts from school (all day long) begging me to bring whatever forgotten item my kids may have left on the counter, navigating the parking lot at the supermarket and of course what is for dinner. Out of all the “troubling” things I have to deal with during the day, what I am making for dinner may rank at the top of the list.

I am out of ideas of what to feed my family. I do troll FB and instagram looking for ideas. Mostly I end up feeling bad about myself and my cooking abilities. The Tasty videos are awesome to watch but has anyone ever tried to make one? I have and all I realized is that I am a terrible cook.  I have a standard rotation of 5 basic dishes.  Most of them from the back of a Campbell soup can.

So, with that in mind, the other night when my 16 year old was getting ready to go to soccer and needed a “healthy” meal, I felt pretty sure of myself that I could provide that. After rummaging through the refrigerator I came up with the remains of a rotisserie Barbeque chicken. That was it. To be creative I thought, I will add some avocado as well. Look at me, lots of protein and almost instagram worthy! Then I remembered that a friend was kind enough to bring me these new rice tortillas she was raving about from Trader Joe’s. They are not made with flour, they are made with rice so they are paper thin almost cellophane looking.  I could make a wrap. Because I was dealing with getting her dinner, feeding my dog and probably texting I grabbed the first thing I felt in the bag.

The tortilla felt really thin, paper thin but my friend did say they had a differnt texture and tasted kind of gross so I wasn’t very surprised. When I went to roll it up, I struggled a bit due to the tortillas consistancy but I did it. I have to say it looked pretty good. I thought the texture was weird but then I remembered the rice noodles at the chinese restaurant and their cellophane like appearance, exactly like my tortilla so I was confident that this was just healthy and weird.

I gave it to my daughter who promptly said “What the hell is this?” “Why does this look so weird?”  I immediately told her to stop complaining, be happy she wasn’t eating ravioli out of a can like I did as a kid and just eat it. She continued, “Mom, there is something wrong with this, it’s paper. This is not a tortilla.”  This went on for the duration of her eating the entire tortilla. She had taken one bite decided it was not for her and picked all the ingredients out.  Because she is tenacious she continued on and on about the stupid tortilla. So to shut her up I pulled out the package to prove to her they were indeed just gross tortillas and not paper.

As I threw the package at her to prove my point I pulled out the tortilla to show her, unfortunately for me the tortilla was sandwiched between 2 pieces of paper. Paper that I thought was a wrap and made my daughter dinner with. I made my daughter a paper wrap.

Here is the thing that makes this worse. I did not care. I laughed. I laughed so hard I peed my pants (although that does not take much these days). My daughter was convinced she was poisoned by eating paper. I tried to explain to her that eating paper does not make you sick, my youth was spent eating processed meats in a can. Toughen up snowflake or I will give you an expired yogurt.

Add this to my list of parenting fails. Paper dinner. Maybe next week I will serve tin can dessert!

#parentinginthenewmilleniumsucks

This is the actual tortilla bag. 

This is the tortilla against the paper. I could esily see how one could mix up the tortilla and the paper. Just saying.