Kitchen Adventures

Remember my new year's resolution to start cooking for myself more, ideally at least two home cooked meals a month?-Well, wait, first let me interrupt myself and say this: that resolution sounds kind of misleading, because it makes it sound as if I never make meals for myself at home. The truth is that I do make meals for myself at home fairly often, and not just heating up frozen food, either (although to be honest that's most of it). I make sandwiches, hot dogs, a variety of quesadillas, three or four different types of eggs, pancakes once in a while, the occasional salad...so I do make things for myself fairly often but I hardly ever do cooking that involves actually following a recipe and using kitchen tools like cutting boards and whisks and stuff like that.
So anyway, my resolution is to make two homecooked meals a month. The other day at the store I bought one of those large chef's skillets figuring that if I dropped twenty bucks on a skillet I'd be a lot more willing to actually stick to this resolution. I also bought all of the ingredients to make a macaroni and cheese meal from my Rachael Ray cookbook. The recipe seemed easy enough, and my goal was to start out with something I probably couldn't screw up.
Well, the recipe wasn't as foolproof as I thought. The recipes in this Rachael Ray cookbook are already basically "Cooking for Dummies". I apparently need "Cooking for Completely Incompetent and Inept Idiots". Here are things that almost tripped me up:
1) My cheese grater is complete and utter crap, which I didn't discover until I tried to use it tonight and it basically broke in my hand. So I ended up having to chop the cheese into slivers using a knife. Note to self: Buy better grater. Oh, and I also realized about midway through the cheese chopping process that I could have just bought a bag of pre-shredded sharp cheddar cheese and saved myself five minutes. It's okay though because the cheese still melted like it was supposed to and it was probably better quality cheese than the pre-shredded stuff anyway.
2) Speaking of the cheese, I forgot all about it until my pasta water was already boiling. I prepped everything else before I started but forgot all about the cheese so I had to chop it up as fast as I could, all the while hoping my pasta wouldn't boil over in the meantime. Luckily the timing worked out perfectly on that somehow and I finished with the cheese right as my pasta was ready.
3) My sauce almost boiled over three different times. Each time I picked it up off the burner just in time to prevent a giant mess.
4) I thought this would be really easy, but it was actually kind of tricky because both the pasta and the sauce were cooking on the stove at once, and once the sauce started cooking everything had to come together really fast which kind of stressed me out because I'm more of a one-step-at-a-time kind of person.
But nothing burned, and nothing boiled over, and it actually came out really good!
All in all I'm pretty proud of myself, and I'm going to try to actually stick to this resolution and try something else within the next couple of weeks. It may be a very small and stupid accomplishment, but hey, it's something. Next meal I'm determined to do something with meat because I've never in my life handled raw meat. I'm scared of meals involving cooking meat, I guess because the chances of getting sick are high if I don't do it properly. That and I'm kind of indimidated by the meat department at the grocery store. But I'm going to get over my stupid intimidation and just do it. People much less intelligent than me have successfully cooked a chicken breast.
So yeah, I definitely want to learn to be a better and more confident cook, and the only way I can do that is to just get a lot of practice. The thing is, it's going to be harder to do once school starts. This meal tonight took me about forty minutes to prepare including prep time and cleaning time. Then it took me twenty minutes to eat, so all told I spent an hour on dinner tonight. It's kind of hard to justify spending an hour or more on dinner when normally it takes about twenty to thirty minutes total including cooking and eating time. But I'm sure I can manage twice a month. The only other problem is the amount of food. This meal I made tonight serves four, and it's BIG portions, too. I ate some for dinner and just portioned out some leftovers to take over to Matthew (I'm glad I have a neighbor to share leftovers with) but I still have enough to probably eat three more meals. And I highly doubt I'm gonna want mac and cheese three more times this week.
Oh well. I'm proud of myself!
So, this was the most boring enter ever, wasn't it?