Salty Potatos

Jen and I for the first time and my entire family over for dinner, which was me, my mom, my little sister Marti, and my older sister Marin. Marin is five months pregnant, my mother just has to put her dog (our dog) down because she had cancer, her aunt, 103, is in the hospital with no hope of returning to her assistant living car facility, her brother most likely has alzheimer's or some form of dementia, his son, my mother's god son, my cousin, recently died of a heroin overdose. So needless to say, things could be better, however my sister is having a little girl, which is the ray of sunshine in this somewhat bleak year. That is just what is going on with my mom, I am not talking about my back, tooth, car, Jen's family, brother, friends, it is all really trying. In my family when we are all at each others through and when things are the crappiest we do the only logical thing, have a family dinner. My mother and sisters were all at each others throat while they were waiting for 3 hours before we were ready to have them over for dinner. I am not sure exactly what happened, but around 5:30pm a 1/2 hour before they were all supposed to be there I got a call from my mother, who was at the grocery store near my house. Apparently my sisters left her there because she was being difficult. So I did what any good son would do, I picked her up, took her home, and gave her wine, a lot of wine, and she began to relax and we were all having a good time. For a brief moment in this dark moment of our lives we were all having a good time, though there was still some tension left over from the days events. This was the first time I have ever had my entire family over for dinner, and obviously the first time for Jen. It is a little weird having them over to our place, which my sister owns, but we did the best we could. My mother wanted to take us all out to dinner so we wouldn't be troubled. Marin wanted us to do this, our first dinner, she knew that we needed to, and she was right. I made my mediterranean chicken. Jen made the appetizers, salads, bread (she outsourced this to Marti only to have her burn the first batch, o - how Clark over her), and potatoes. Jen makes the best potatoes ever. I was happy to buy all the stuff for these potatoes, which was a good 50% of the dinner cost. (I already had the chicken and other stuff). Upon tasting the potatoes Jen noticed they were too salty, this would not do. Now my family loves salt, my brother in law will not have popcorn with Marin because she dumps a load of salt on them. This is who we are, and we all have low blood pressure, odd. Jen, getting nervous about the shape of the potatoes decides to do something about it, and not clearing it with me first. See this is the biggest obstacle with Jen's cooking. She is so good at it when she doesn't impulsively do something really really stupid. So, the potatoes are too salty, what do you do with salty potatoes drenched in olive oil? Put some more potatoes in there to absorb it? Ask me if my family would mind? Not Jen. Jen decides that the best thing to do for salty potatoes was too... Pour water on them. What do you do when you eat salty food, get thirst, so you drink water. Makes sense? Not to us, but Jen this was the best solution. It didn't work. The potatoes were still salty. Jen thinks, "Hmmm, I didn't put enough water in them, I will put more." And she does. So now we have salty and soggy potatoes. Jen claims that her plan was to wash the salt way and have it evaporate, never mind the olive oil or where the salty water was going to go, this was just not a good idea. However, this idea, made perfect sense to Jennifer, and she will still defend it citing salt in the air near the beach and how she was rinsing the potatoes, and will not admit that this was another one of her bad cooking ideas. She is learning, I give her that, and I can't help but think that these innocent fixes to problems based solely on Jen's unique logic is what I love most about her.