I Pledge, Well Kind of

You bet I accepted the Huffington Post’s Week of Eating In Challenge. I’m all in.  Shine that spotlight on homemade meals and watch me frugally budget.  Who knows? All that money I’m saving could add up to bags of gold that will allow me, some day, to bid adieu to my aging appliances and rip out the Formica that callously imprisons my kitchen in the late 1970s.

Pledge-smedge, bring it on.

We eat in all the time anyway and what a perfect excuse to try out new recipes and yippee for family cohesion and what? What’s that you say? It’s this week? Oh no that simply won’t do.  This is the week of my 40th birthday and I’ve got visitors in town and lunch dates and hey, BACK OFF!  I’m pretty sure that everyone out there in pledgeville would agree that no one should have to cook dinner on her 40th birthday.

How about this?  I’ll gladly pledge you Tuesday for a birthday dinner today?  Just this week, that’s all I’m asking and then I promise I will cook at home from here to eternity.

I can say this with conviction, because based on my incredible haul of birthday loot I know that there is an awful lot of cooking in my future.

It’s awesome, isn’t it? My gorgeous cherry red Kitchen-Aid surrounded by the best books in the biz. I can’t wait to start flinging flour.

Rest assured I am going to spend hours gleaming expert advice from these legendary cookbooks.  I will create masterpieces that will have eaters in tears.  Already I have visions of Crepes Suzette dancing in my delusional head.

But I have to tell you, despite thousands of pages of beautifully detailed recipes, the advice that captured my loins attention came not from a renowned book nor from a celebrity chef.

No, one voice stood out from the crowd.  His beautiful, naked request really spoke to me.  Grabbed me in that visceral sort of way. (Visceral sort of way = passionately around the waist as the sun set over the waving wheat and he easily hoisted me up onto the saddle and steadied me with one bronzed arm as he steered the steed towards the nearest haystack.)

Now that I am older and wiser I understand why, as some women age, they seek to make changes.  Some take up knitting.  Some go blond.

In honor of my 40th birthday I have officially changed my name.

Call me Biscuit.