30 and Counting: 30 and counting......on someone else to do the shopping.

Last night when I came home (from a trip to Disneyland with fifteen 8-year-olds), I was exhausted. Absolutely exhausted. I just wanted beer. Beer and couch. Beer, couch, sleep.

My sister: "You know what I've been craving lately? Those black bean-banana empanadas you made."

Black Bean Banana Empanadas require homemade wholewheat dough. They also require chopping, sauteing, recipe reading, and baking. None of which appeared on my Beer-couch-sleep schedule. But there is little I can refuse my baby sister.

So, I started making substitutions.

Me: "If I make the dough, it has to sit for an hour. It's 7:00 now, which means they won't even go into the oven till after 8. We wouldn't be able to eat till almost 9:00. Why don't you just pick up some ready-made pie crusts. I can use them instead."

My sister (Becca): "But then we'd be eating processed white bread." I have trained her well. Ugh.

I ended up sending her to the store for some whole wheat pizza dough, bananas, chopped onions, and cilantro.

Pizza dough? 1 point for Becca. The bananas she bought? Too green. The onions? Chopped SWEET onions. I kind of have a thing about using the appropriate onion. This was not a sweet onion kind of time. The cilantro? "They were out of cilantro." Left-over papalo instead. Brave choice.

The filling was OK. The bananas never really broke down, but who's counting? The papalo was fine, aside from her complaint that it made the house smell like 'burnt oil and armpits.' (she has an overly dramatic sense of smell) The crust was a nightmare. It was just too springy and stretchy. I had to make Becca hold it still while I smushed the filling in so it wouldn't spring back before I could stretch it closed.

Disneyland on a bus. With 8-year-olds.

So far, no beer, no couch, no sleep, and no dinner to boot.

Finally, I got the empanadas in the oven.

Becca: "Let's watch a movie while we eat." (we have no cable)

Me: "Ok. What came from Netflix?"

Becca: "Some German movie about a serial killer."

D'oh! One day I put all the movies that 'will make me seem smarter if I've seen them' in my queue. Apparently, we've finally reached them. Last week I watched 'The Maltese Falcon' when what I really wanted was anything-with-Katherine-Heigl.

Finally at 9:00pm, we sat down to the ugliest black bean-banana empanadas you've ever seen to watch Fritz Lang's 'M'. I had my beer, I had my couch, and the food wasn't half bad if you didn't look directly at it.