Instead of dwelling on all of the things in life lately which make me want to hunker down in my room and shut out the world for, oh, a month or two… let’s talk about a positive accomplishment. While you may not find it impressive, consider that it took several minutes of internal debate, clear instructions and some encouragement from Kyla to pull it off.

I fried up some chicken to add to my pasta-and-cheese.

I hit the store on Saturday and picked up some ingredients for my (in)famous baked pasta-and-cheese dish, the one that only the kids and I actually enjoy eating. I figured that either I’d feed the kids during their visit, or I’d make it up and use it for lunches. Since Kyla came up with awesome nosh while the kids were over, my fixings were promptly earmarked for the work week.

Part of Kyla’s recipe involved chicken breast meat, but she didn’t use all of it. When she left this morning she was going to take the last two hunks of meat but I made an off-hand remark about what it might be like to add chicken to the pasta-and-cheese. “Well, you could fry it up,” she said.

“No, I can’t. This is me, remember? Mr. No-can-cook?”

“Yes, you can.”

To shorten a rambling post, I kept the chicken and she went home for day. Following her instructions I sliced the chicken meat into reasonably small chunks, pan-fried those in butter (adding a liberal sprinkling of lemon & herb seasoning I found in the cupboard), and… they turned out pretty good.

It took five full minutes for me to work up the nerve to turn on the stove, however.

Let’s see how many anxiety triggers we cleared this afternoon: Using a sharp knife (never mind cutting difficult-to-handle, for me, foodstuffs). Making sure I cooked the meat thoroughly. Making sure I didn’t burn anything or anyone. Trying something completely new, unsupervised.

Am I a sad, pathetic example of humanity? Most of the time, yes. But today I prepared tasty chicken bits which, once drained and added to the pasta dish, worked superbly. (Yes… I enjoyed a small plate of the freshly-made product. It would’ve been a shame not to!) And I have lunches for four of the next five working days, assuming I remember that they’re in the refrigerator each morning…

Oh, yeah: Bonus points if you can name the tune in the post title without cheating.