The One With the Chocolate in the Charger

Once again, I am confronted with the realization that I cannot control my own fate. Okay, so I don’t really believe in fate, per se… but you know what I mean. The last week of August, I had to cater a wedding reception for 500. Usually I have a partner to cook with, and we can split up the tasks. Having a partner doesn’t make it twice as easy. It makes it exponentially easier... something more like twenty times as easy. I know that doesn’t totally make sense, but it is true. Maybe when I am catering with Fawn, she does most of the work! I hadn’t thought of that… I hope it isn’t true, but there it is. A distinct possibility.

So anyway, it was a Friday. I had done as much of the prep work as I could on Thursday. Alright, that is a lie. I had procrastinated a few things I could have done on Thursday, and they were coming back to bite me. It was two hours before the reception, and I was officially losing my sanity. I had co-opted the help of my 16-year-old son Dillon and his friend Sam, and we were running from place to place, dropping off supplies at the venue, picking up last-minute items at stores. I sent Dillon into a store with my credit card to pick up all the cut fruit for the displays, and I kept Sam to help me load my car quickly while Dillon was in the store. As we pulled away from the store, my mind was a snarl of stressful thoughts. I was imagining all the things I still had to do, and realizing there was not time to do them. Just then, I noticed a car backing out toward me. I was already passing her, and I chanted aloud, Don’t hit my car, don’t hit my car… and then CRASH. She hit my car.
Maybe it was just a little reminder. Things can always be worse. And after all, it is just a car. I really don’t care about cars. So this week my car is in the body shop being fixed. The lady’s insurance paid for a rental car, which happens to be this pretty sporty Dodge Charger. I have been enjoying driving around in it. Except this morning we got in it to go to church, and Skippy told me, Mama, I think you ruined your new car.

It is not ruined, exactly.

I had glazed two giant chocolate ganache cakes a couple of hours before the event I catered yesterday. When it was time to leave, they were still a little wet (translation: gooey chocolate bombs just waiting to go off). So we lined the back seat of the Charger with newspaper and set the cakes, still on a cooling rack, where they would not slide around. And they didn’t. All the way to Orange, thirty miles and three different freeways. All the way until the off-ramp thirty seconds from the venue. It was a shorter off-ramp than I anticipated. You know what? They still tasted good, and a little upholstery cleaning later, and you can barely tell at all. And you know what else? There are worse things. Ask any car rental place. I bet they will tell you that they practically never have people coming in to complain that their rental car smells like chocolate.