Sunday nights in our house are sacrosanct.
This is the one night of the week when we've always been home together for a family meal.
In the winter, I will often roast a chicken.
In the summer, we barbecue.
Lately, we've become fans of grilling wild salmon fillets on a cedar plank, which we soak in water an hour before we put it on the grill. All you have to do is drizzle a little olive oil on top and sprinkle with some sea salt and freshly ground pepper -- and it tastes amazing.
I recently discovered that Costco sells wild-caught salmon for about half the price you pay at Gelson's and Whole Foods. The problem with the Costco salmon is that it comes packaged in 2-pound segments... which are a bit too long for my cedar planks, so I have to cut off a small portion on the end. Even so, it's a bargain.
Tonight I had a little problem. The knife I usually use for this task was nowhere to be found.
It wasn't in the knife block. It wasn't in any of my drawers. It wasn't drying on the counter. It wasn't in the dishwasher (and as it's supposed to be hand-washed, I would have been upset to find it there, anyway).
"I didn't touch it," my husband grumbled.
I spent the next five minutes opening and slamming drawers, moving things around, trying to find the knife. It's part of a Henckels set I purchased after we finished renovating our kitchen, and I've been determined to take good care of it. Being unable to locate it was driving me crazy.
A couple of minutes later, my husband walked back into the kitchen.
"It's possible I threw it out," he said sheepishly. "I heard a thump when I took out the trash after I did the dishes the other night. I just didn't think anything of it."
I reacted pretty much as you would expect me to.
"Way to get out of ever doing the dishes," our daughter said.
He didn't hear. He was out back, dumpster diving through our garbage bins. I saw him pull out a barbecue fork. It was covered in used cat litter. He started hosing it off.
"You don't have to do that. That's only a few dollars to replace," I said. My husband shrugged me off.
I glanced at my kitchen tool canister. It used to contain two of those forks. Now it had none. Come to think of it, my last favorite knife - an expensive one I'd bought from Pampered Chef - had also disappeared under mysterious circumstances. I was ready to start browsing through my Williams-Sonoma catalog for a replacement.
A few minutes later, he walked back in with the fork... and my missing knife.
"You're welcome," he said.
I looked at him as if he was crazy. "YOU throw out my good knife and you expect me to thank you?"
"Well, I remembered what happened to it, didn't I?"
Tomorrow is trash day. If I hadn't needed the knife tonight, there would have been NO WAY I'd have it back. In fact, he would have probably insisted that he'd never seen it, he'd never touched it, and losing it was probably my fault. And I would have gone along with that. I am the type of person who bumps into a pole and says "I'm sorry." He's the type of person who throws out an expensive knife and expects me to thank him when he finds it again.
Knife and fork are now soaking in about five kettles of boiled water... and I'm thinking about how differently men and women view the world.
DISCLOSURE: No companies were quid pro quo'd for this post. My knife and barbecue fork will not be placed back in use until I am certain they are clean and sterile.
