Last night I went to bed at 10:30. I was awakened at 12:30, 1:30, 3:30, and 5:30 by my housemates of assorted ages. Three of these wakings resulted in out of bed experiences, which are nothing like out of body experiences, in case you were wondering.

So I was really tired when I embraced the morning at 5:55. The only reason we got to school on time is because I have finally, nearly five years into parenthood, realized the art of The Night Before. Moms for centuries have operated under the slogan “Survive tomorrow by planning for it today!” And yet in our house it took the acquisition of one child per adult to finally teach us – ummmm possibly just me? – how to be plan-ahead grownups.

Despite my sleep deprivation I was convinced that with my new Plan Ahead scheme I could execute the modest, five dish Mediterranean meal I’ve had planned but been putting off for days, complete with freshly baked pita because really the internet says it is not hard. Even though I’ve never successfully rolled out a pie crust in my life (which has never stopped me from continuing to make quiche), several professional food bloggers say I can easily make pita, and so I determined it.

But first, I had to make tahini. Why on earth, you may ask?

Due to a slight food hoarding tendency, I own a half gallon jar full of sesame seeds and a VitaMix blender which is purported to pulverize a number of dry ingredients into creamy wonders. Also I am out of tahini.

Here is how the internet’s many reputable sources say to make tahini:

1. Put sesame seeds in a high powered blender.
2. Turn the blender on and gradually increase the speed.

Voila, tahini! Pour it out, clean your blender, and beam with pride.

Here are only some of the things that went wrong while trying to realize the simple two step goal of making tahini:

1. Ounces weight or ounces volume? I hate you non-metric system.
2. Searching for the sword shaped blender tamper which was probably hidden from a child intent on hitting another child with it, but I will not name names here.
3. Dropping a butter knife covered in hummus down my only clean pants.
4. Over heating the blender five times.
5. Stepping on the tahini covered butter knife on the floor that I neglected to clean up when it slid down my pants.
6. Chopping off the corner of my favorite pink pig shaped spatula which I stupidly believed I could use as a tamper and keep out of the way of the blade despite my clumsy stumbling about in the kitchen as though I’d never cooked before in my life.
7. Dumping the half seed/half sesame fluff out in search of the pink spatula corner, hoping it did not become one with the future tahini à la Blendtec “Will it blend?!” videos. (Waste your time, it’s worth it.)

To make a long story even longer, all I was trying to do was follow a new hummus recipe, even though a perfectly fine hummus recipe already exists on this very blog. This other hummus recipe is scaled to the 16oz jar of tahini you might find in a store which means you don’t have to spend time mixing in the oil, chipping out the bottom, etc you just dump the whole thing in, #tahiniproblems be gone!

To make a long story even stupider, I actually own HALF A CASE full of 16 oz tahini cans from an erroneous order at the restaurant. But I didn’t have my resto keys when I was out on my bike raiding my sister’s fridge because she is on vacation and offered free food (did I mention my slight food hoarding problem?) and also, super bonus, a new box of underwear she didn’t want! Hence the tahini making, and the attempt to figure out how many sesame seeds will result in a quantity of tahini that would fit into a 16 ounce jar, which I thought I had but actually my cabinet’s empty jar says 2 lb (908g) which led to some renewed cursing of the English system of measurement. Thoroughly fed up, I dumped double the amount of seeds suggested by the simple tahini recipe into the blender and when it jammed began adding the liquid ingredients from the hummus recipe, basically pretending that the half ground seeds would become tahini later. In our house we call this magical thinking. In other houses I would just be labeled insane.

So now the blender is full of almost tahini and a quantity of salt and lemon juice that render it unusable as tahini, because the other ingredients are scaled to the enormous hummus recipe that is supposed to match the empty jar of tahini I have in the cabinet except it is the wrong size empty jar of tahini. Are you completely bonkers yet? It is at this point that I realize I desperately need to take a nap.

Just kidding. That comes later.

It is at this point, while I am waiting for the blender to cool down since it has overheated and shut off for the fifth time, that I decide to see if maybe I should start on the baba ghanoush, which I learned just today isn’t actually baba ghanoush but a dip correctly called moutabbal. I’m still trying to feel my feelings about this heartbreak and confusion, brought to my attention by the professional food blogger who claims that pita bread is easy to make, so I’m not sure she can be trusted because look how easy tahini is to make, am I right?

Anyway, I have these eggplants that I cooked in the oven last week but they didn’t get charred and smoky on the outside and they’ve been in the fridge almost too long, hence the necessity of having Mediterranean night RIGHT NOW in today’s sleep deprived stupor. So while the blender is making sure it doesn’t catch on fire, I light up the gas stove, wipe off the chilly, slimy, fully cooked eggplant, and lay its limp body tenderly across those metal prong things on the burner. You know, just to see if I might be able to reclaim my faith in my ability to cook food. While the burner burns away, I transfer as much as the hummus as I can from the blender to a large food processor and begin processing away, in hopes that the whole sesame seeds and whole chickpeas will somehow magically become smoothy and creamy hummus.

The deflated eggplant’s painfully spiky collar catches fire. (Did I mention that these two eggplants were 2/3 of the crop of our garden eggplant plant after the deer ate most of the leaves and all the other plants around it died of blight? I’ve got a lot invested in this particular batch of creamy eggplant dip.) The house begins to smell like a cheap unventilated dive bar, like cigarettes with extra tar.

It is at this point that I turn off the burner, unplug all the machines, ponder the futility of my own existence, and go upstairs for a 30 minute power nap. When my alarm rings, I feel a bit better, so I roll over and take another one. Finally I work up the courage to go back downstairs.

In the hour that I have before I need to go pick up the Juniors, I survey the kitchen. There are three bowls of Mediterranean pulverized substances in various states of completion, and a lot of containers, blades, and RIP spatulas to clean. The “baba ghanoush” is not smoky and the seeds aren’t quite soft enough, but really it isn’t baba ghanoush anyway and I have a full quart – four blasted cups – of that fine substance, its name and origin be damned.

The hummus gets retransferred from the food processor back to the VitaMix where, with the addition of some ice water, it blends into a relatively creamy substance before auto shutoff occurs yet again. I slop two cups of it into a bowl, pour on some smoked paprika and cumin, flood the top with olive oil. Looks great, tastes like…salt? I can’t even tell, my tongue has been burned off with so much eggplant and tahini tasting. Two more cups go into a leftover container for my mom who can add garlic to anything and make it taste good. The other three cups of hummus I consider taking outside into the back yard and throwing at the fence.

When I return home with the boys they are uncharacteristically self-entertained, so I start in on the pita bread. I read several recipes online, nod thoughtfully, and proceed to follow none of the instructions. By the time The Hubs gets home – “Oooooo, look at that hummus!” – the fire alarm is no longer going off and I have sliced a gorgeous heirloom tomato from my mom’s garden, mixed a bowl of some pickled garden beets with fresh peaches, parsley, and bleu cheese, and am setting warm, only slightly burned pita bread on the table outside next to some very large containers of dips. Vats of dips. Dips for days. It is only now that I’m wondering why I didn’t consider what we, a family of four, two of whom eat at mealtime either a.) nothing, b.) only dried fruit, or c.) sometimes capers would do with six or seven cups of fresh hummus and a quart of eggplant dip.

The Hubs will take it in stride and eat hummus every meal until he can no longer stomach it. Me, I’m going to go sigh into my overheated blender and then unsubscribe from every food blogger’s tantalizing email newsletter I can think of.  Except for the one that will tell me what to do with a huge bowl of leftover hummus.