Mom is back from Paris, where she spent the entire month of July. Today she went a little nuts with cooking and made four or five different chicken dishes at dinner. I'm not talking single servings, either. When she made baked "fried" chicken legs, she made a dozen of them. She made a huge bowl full of mango-chutney chicken, a pot of chicken with thai curry sauce, and a crock pot of chicken stew. Plus another dish of 'plain' baked chicken. I'm thinking a minimum of five pounds of chicken got processed in Mom's kitchen.

The thing is, there wasn't a party or any large group of people coming over. It's just my mom, my dad, Seanie and I at the house right now. Dad doesn't eat at home. So that's three of us tackling piles and piles of chicken meat, which after two or three days dries out and doesn't taste so hot. Yay. <- I'm thrilled. I just don't get why she's still mass-producing when she cooks. It made sense when she was working, because she didn't always have time to cook a full meal every day, but now that she's retired she should step back and try to produce food in smaller quantities. It tastes so much better when it's freshly prepared that I'm sure more of it will get eaten, and in the long term she'll end up throwing so much less away each week.

Maybe I just miss being able to cook whatever I felt like eating while Mom was in France. It's hard to justify frying up some fish or a quiche when there's five pounds of poultry waiting to be devoured...