Secret recipe: frozen dinners

Frozen dinners rarely capture my attention, but when the prices plunged to spare change, I quickly realized fried chicken dinner costs less than stopping at my husband’s favorite chicken place. Besides which I don’t have the cooking equipment to duplicate franchise fried chicken. I bought a few for our freezer.
It only took one time of nuking the chicken to realize the rubbery texture is not the same as crispy fried chicken. Thereafter I emptied the plastic trays out into serving dishes, nuked the chicken just long enough to thaw it, then stuck it in our convection oven, until it sizzled. A few added seasonings to the accompanying side dishes fixed their industrial blandness.
I showed one of my sons my secret recipe for fried chicken, including the quick maneuver to tuck the colorful flat boxes out of sight into the trash.
He learned very well.
I returned close to meal time one day to find him busy setting the table for a meal of fried chicken dinner. I gasped. “You bought chicken?”
He looked at me in strangely. He pinches pennies tighter than I do.
“You made this?” He just stared at me.
Oh, right – he was using our secret family recipe.
One of our exchange students likes to help in the kitchen. Over the course of the past few months we have developed a rhythm to meal preparations. Some days we work in tandem preparing stir-fry dishes and rice. Other times we prepare a couple main dishes to re-heat on busy days. She follows the recipes much more precisely than I do and has a good sense of timing and what needs to be done.
One evening as I considered what to prepare, I remembered I had chicken dinners in the freezer. “Shall we use my secret recipe for an easy supper? Or shall we pull out a cookbook and make something.”
“I like easy.” she said.
I retrieved four boxes, pulled the tabs and began popping frozen food out of the serving trays. She caught on quickly to this cooking technique.
I added ranch dressing to the mashed potatoes and salt and butter to the corn. “A few herbs and spices help,” I said, “but the most important part of the meal is that you must hide the boxes,” I said stuffing them in the trash under some old newspapers.
I pulled out a package of frozen vegetables and a roll of frozen homemade cookie dough that I sliced to bake while we ate. We set the table. Within 20 minutes we sat down to a chicken dinner with vegetables, potatoes and piping hot cookies for dessert.
I did not realize how secret our family recipe is until last week. I was tired, short on time and had fish dinners. She pulled tabs and took care of the trash. I made tartar sauce with a dash of dill, added seasoning and meat to the macaroni and cheese and scraped the brownie batter into a small baking dish, topped it with nuts and put it into the oven with the fish. We made a salad and feasted through dessert when my husband wanted seconds of the hot brownies with nuts topped with whipped cream.
He assured the other exchange student, “Joan always fixes more than what she serves.”
My kitchen-helper and I grinned at each other across the table, “Not today. That’s it. Just one a piece.” He looked at me in disbelief, but there were no more brownies.
Our secret reposed in the bottom of the trash barrel – and we weren’t sharing it with anyone.


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