Malbec to the rescue!

Last week my husband was driving me to drink. This was before the missing Le Creuset incident and it really was his fault this time. The cause? I don't know... he's a man. I'm not.

There was a wrench in my "I'd love a bottle of wine" plan: It was 4:00 on a Wednesday and aside from not wanting to be a lush drinking alone I still had dinner to make because somehow that became my job in life to make sure other people stay alive in my house. And please, don't ever give me a plant unless you want it to die because all I will accept responsibility for are the things with legs in my house. So... back to the "how to stop plotting ways to torture my husband" plan. What to do, what to do? I opened a bottle of red to help me figure this out (you see where this is going, right?)

It was at this point the neighbor called to say hi and the answer popped into my head: how could I be considered a boozer if I wasnt drinking by myself but instead had "company"? See, wine helps you think this shit through. She came over with her troops and we continued with our drinking-to-drown-our-suburban-crises quest while our children ran wild downstairs (Note: no children were harmed in the making of this post!) Still, the dilemma was that I was supposed to be feeding people and somehow through my solution I had more than doubled the number of people I had to keep alive for the evening. (Another note: why do these beings have to eat so much? Is it just me? I could live on a box of Captain Crunch for a week but these people eat three times a day... and want me to supply it!)

That's how bottle number 2 got opened! After all, it was so successful at answering my first question! Mmmmm... Malbec! Half way through bottle number two I somehow had managed to boil pasta, saute pancetta and leeks, deglaze a pan with white wine, and look somewhat like I knew what I was doing when my husband walked in the door from work.

He couldn't be mad... there was "company"! I was uh... entertaining. And somehow 37 ounces of shared wine made him look good again! Me on the other hand? Here's what I think I looked like:

But here's what I actually looked like:

In the end, I made what my neighbors called a chef worthy dinner that they would order at a fine restaurant, shared laughs with a friend, didn't duct tape any children to a chair, kept 9 people fed to live another day, liked my husband again, and woke up without a hangover! I call that a very successful Wednesday night!


PS Thank you Ree Drummond, aka The Pioneer Woman, for your very lovely wino-proof Pasta with pancetta and leeks recipe!

PPS If the picture doesn't do it, you can get a sense of what I looked like here:

:)