Last night I fucked up.
I was going to make a meatloaf with the ground beef and ground turkey, but I had my orientation for school, then I had to go to the store to get ingredients, and by the time I came home Kayla was already coming home in the next five minutes. I didn’t have time to make the meatloaf. So, what did I do? I heated up the leftovers instead. Kayla doesn’t like leftovers too often, so it was a stretch to think she’d eat it.
And guess what? She didn’t.
Some leftovers were too old so she threw it away. Some leftovers were the same thing she ate for lunch, so that wouldn’t work. And the other leftovers she just plain didn’t want. She spent a good 15-20 minutes feeling bad because she had a long day and was still hungry (and even a little homesick), while I felt dejected for letting her down.
I went back on my computer, trying to decide what to do for dinner, and I found a tab open to this Hawaiian restaurant in Minneapolis that I found earlier. Luckily for us it was open for another 45 minutes and only 15 minutes away. I took a sigh of relief when KJ said that worked, so we put the dogs away and headed out the door.
When we got there we found out it was the restaurant inside United Noodles, the Asian grocery store. The place is called Ono Hawaiian Plates and they had all kinds of plate lunches, so Kayla got the kalua pork with shoyu poke and I just got a hamburger steak. The cashier Jessie was super nice too.
It’s always refreshing meeting someone from back home. There’s just a sense of knowing they understand what you may be going through, being from the same place in a foreign land. The food was, in fact, ono. And it was kinda cozy eating around the images of Waikiki and Hawai’i with the plants all around.
At the end of the night, after talking story with Jessie a little, we packed up our new leftovers and headed home. In the end, we found a delicious dinner, and the homesickness we both felt was alleviated a bit. I’m making the meatloaf tonight, in time for Kayla’s arrival back home after work.
Lesson learned.