Captain Husband's Kitchen Capers

Photo courtesy Life Photo Archives

In the interest in spending more time together (while spending less money), Captain Husband and I have been trying to cook more meals at home. We've got a pretty good arrangement going so far; we switch off every other night, and whoever didn't make dinner that evening has to do the cleanup. All in all, a pretty fair deal that's been working quite well for us. CH has really gotten into it, actually, and will go online the night before his day to cook to search up new recipes to try. The other day he sent me the following link for pasta fagioli and wanted to know if I'd be up to try it. Though the dish looked to be a little more labor intensive than what CH has previously attempted, I figured if he was up for the challenge then more power to him.

When I came home from work that night, I opened the front door only to be walloped in the face by the overwhelming smell of garlic. As I continued up the two flights of stairs to our main living area, the garlic smell became stronger and stronger; seriously, my eyes were watering before I had even made it into the kitchen. As soon as CH heard me enter, he turned around and said, "I think I bit off more than I could chew with this one." Kitchen gadgets, various vegetables and pasta fragments were strewn across the counter tops. I mentioned something about the overwhelming aroma coming from the stove and asked CH just how much garlic the recipe called for, anyway. "Well, it said three cloves, so I bought one of these," as he gestured to a package that had formerly contained three bulbs of garlic, "and minced two of them, because three seemed like an awful lot of garlic." After hearing this, I doubled over in laughter, realizing his mistake. "I hope you like potent soup, because you were only supposed to use the little parts that composed the whole bulb...those are the cloves that the recipe called for!" CH turned to the bubbling mess on the stove top, and eyed it balefully. In humorous defeat, he turned to me, smiled and said, "So...um, you want to order a pizza?"

We're still working on getting the garlic smell out of the house, but boy, was that pizza tasty.