Father's Day Dinner

I thought I knew why I was so grumpy on Saturday.

The day before, I'd gone on a twelve-hour, in-state road trip with the fam. It was fun, certainly, but it left me profoundly exhausted.

That was why I was grumpy.

And achey.

And dizzy.

And prone to sudden fits of tears.

It wasn't until the next morning, when I woke up suddenly and had to race to the bathroom, that I realized the true culprit.

Stomach flu.

When I come down with any variety of influenza, my first impulse is to cancel my plans for that day...that week...the rest of my life. That leaves me free to lie abed and feel miserable.

This time, I found a substitute for my Sunday school class. I canceled my visiting teaching appointments. I gave up hope of spending a quiet morning writing in my journal and making corn chowder and instead resigned myself to agony.

There was only one problem... I couldn't cancel Father's Day.

More specifically, I couldn't cancel Father's Day dinner.

I was the one who was responsible for making Father's Day dinner. My mother, the hard-working RN, had to work a twelve-hour shift that day, so the lot fell to me. I'd planned the menu. I'd shopped for everything. I was supposed to prepare the main dish.

If Older Sister had been there, I would have handed the responsibility of making the chicken florentine to her. But Older Sister lives in New York City now, and she doesn't have a kitchen in her intern housing where she could prepare the chicken florentine, even if she could have found some instantaneous way to transport it to us.

Obviously, it would have been unthinkable to ask my father to make Father's Day dinner for himself.

That left my younger siblings. I'd recruited their commitment to making side dishes, but I didn't know if they could handle the chicken florentine. When it comes to cooking, they're all a bit...green.

Thus I resolved to wash my hands thoroughly, put on a brave face, and prepare the dish as if I weren't sick in the least.

At first, everything went off without a hitch. I had a butter-burning scare early on, but the burnt butter didn't ruin the first cream sauce in the slightest. When I realized that I couldn't tend to the cream sauce and prepare the spinach, I called in Baby Brother.

Baby Brother was supposed to help Baby Sister slice squash later on. But, figuring that slicing squash was really a one-person job anyways, I instead put him on spinach-washing and stem-plucking duty.

Baby Brother was willing, but he said that he didn't really know how to wash the spinach.

I said something like, "So you put it under the water...and you wash it."

Baby Brother put one spinach leaf under the water.

"But you should probably do more than one at a time!"

While I stirred the cream sauce, Baby Brother washed and de-stemmed the spinach. When it was ready, we threw it in the cream sauce and watched the leaves shrink and shrivel to green goop.

"Now we've made creamed spinach, something that neither of us like," said Baby Brother, master of sass.

The chicken was cooked. The spinach was creamed. That left making the second cream sauce and then baking the whole thing to perfection. Since the cream sauce was but the work of a moment, I preheated the oven and called in the other siblings so that they could start on their side dishes.

Three things happened then. One, the cream sauce didn't thicken...and didn't thicken...and didn't thicken. Which it had time to do, because the three younger siblings took their sweet time coming to the kitchen, which was the second thing to happen. Or, more accurately, not happen. The third thing to happen was that, what with the oven preheating and multiple stove burners going, and what with my parents' air conditioning being broken, the temperature in the kitchen shot to about ninety degrees.

Please remember that I had the stomach flu. Please remember that I'd barely been able to eat anything all day. I had been weak and dizzy before, but now I thought I was going to pass out. I pulled a child's step stool into the kitchen and, in between checking the sauce, I would sit on it. And suffer.

Finally, my younger siblings arrived. Baby Sister was supposed to slice squash for steaming.

I got out a cutting board and told her to wash the squash and slice it.

She wanted to know how to wash the squash.

"So you put it under the water...and you wash it."

"Should I cut it a certain way?"

"Just not too thick," I said. I turned back to the cream sauce for just a moment, and when I looked again, she was cutting the squash so thin that you could read Shakespeare through it.

"I'd make it a little thicker than that!"

The cream sauce still wouldn't thicken. The kitchen was still sweltering. My ability to stay upright was still in question. I was amazed that I hadn't keeled over.

In the meantime, Little Sister and Little Brother were making bacon-wrapped asparagus.

All of my siblings are talented at everything, so I was surprised that they weren't naturally excelling at cooking. They were, however, naturally excelling at overthinking my instructions and wanting to know how to wash vegetables.

"You put it under the water...and you wash it!"

"What do we put it in?" Little Sister asked.

"A pan."

"But what kind of pan?"

"A cookie sheet. Or a broiler pan."

"Whinch one of these is a broiler pan?"

By the time the sauce had finally thickened, my younger siblings had gotten the hang of what they were doing. I was grateful to them for making the side dishes, but I had also worn my nerves thinner than the squash slices or the unthickened cream sauce. Once I'd gotten the chicken florentine placed in the oven, the bread sliced, the steamed squash tender, and the bacon-wrapped asparagus cooling on the stove, I threw myself onto the couch and tried in vain to not feel so overwrought.

Happily, the meal turned out well. And even though I could only consume some bread and steamed squash, everyone else seemed to enjoy themselves immensely. So although I had that strange flu feeling that I would at any moment fly apart at the seams, I had the pleasure of knowing that my work—well, all of our work—had paid off.

Unfortunately, I'd forgotten to plan for dessert.

FAMILY: Instead of dessert, let's pop popcorn and watch Finding Nemo!

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: You do that. I'm going home to die.