Cooking Lessons

Yesterday Lani and I were both late coming home so Lani called and asked Micah and Hannah to make a meatloaf -- a first for both of them. She told them where a recipe was and the items they would need and they said they could do it.

Well, when we got home it was in the oven and looking fine. In fact, when the timer went off and we took it out of the oven, Lani said it was the best-looking meatloaf she'd ever seen in this house (not that we eat meatloaf very often, but it did look good and she was doing her best positive-parenting).

So we got the rest of the dinner done and on the table and everyone settled in, prayed, and then said some nice things to Lani (since it was her birthday) and then served up the best-looking meatloaf ever. . . and then we started taking our first bites. Hannah said "Ooo, what's wrong with this" and others faces puckered & grimaced as they took their first taste. Then Lani said to Micah and Hannah, "Did you put the right seasonings in, or did you BOTH put the seasoning in?"
And Micah said, "Well, it called for 1/2 cup of chopped onion, but we didn't have any fresh onion so I put in 1/2 cup onion salt instead" (Actually, he first said it called for 2 cups of chopped onion and said he'd put in 2 cups of onion salt, which was even funnier at the moment; he later changed his story after retrieving the recipe and remembering what he'd done.). We all laughed pretty hard about his mistake and explained to him that a 1/2 cup of fresh, chopped onion would reduce to a tablespoon or probably less of onion salt.

In the end, we all ate it anyway, but found it was tolerable when you took a bit of meatloaf along with some mashed potatoes and either gravy or ketchup. And we all feared that we'd have strong onion-breath all day the next day (today). Ah, the joys of learning to cook!