I’d like to think that I have a few talents. I am a reasonable artist, I have my lucky academic moments and you can decide whether my writing abilities are worth mentioning but one thing I still struggle with is cooking. Needless to say sometimes one must face ones demons. Okay I suppose not being able to always make food edible is not really a demon but whatever it is I had to face it. My mother has gone away for a couple of days and my sister is on exchange so it’s just me and dad. I felt like macaroni and cheese, and my dad had to work late so I invited a friend over to help me cook it. I wanted company and I thought how hard can Macaroni and cheese be? Dear reader I laugh to myself as write that because with foresight I know the answer.
I found a recipe online. It was easy enough with only 5 ingredients. You may think that a recipe so simple is impossible to screw up… ha ha hadidy da (that’s my rendition of a sarcastic laugh) because we thought the same thing and we failed.
First we had to cook the pasta and according to the recipe the instructions would be on the pasta packet. I can say that they might have been there but I couldn’t tell because it was all in Italian but luckily we aren’t that useless so we put in boiling water with some salt and this part of the recipe worked like a charm except we made too much pasta.
Then it was onto the cheese sauce. It said put a quarter cup of butter and flour into a saucepan. We did this but we didn’t have the right measuring tools so we guessed and well that guess must have been slightly off because there was too much flour for the butter and it clumped up but we thought that if we added the two cups of milk this might sort out our problem. Sigh. It did not. We ended up with milk and clumps of flour. But we had gone too far to turn back and we didn’t have enough milk left to make a second batch so we had to carry on. We added two cups of grated cheese and some salt and pepper (I believe the correct cooking term is ‘a dash’). We stirred all of this and pretended the lumps were cheese rather than flour.
To try and save the meal we or rather I thought we should add bacon. So we fried it up and subsequently burnt it. But there is no point wasting so we mixed together the lumpy sauce, the semi-charred bacon (we left out the completely charred pieces) and mixed it with our pasta. And if you thought it couldn’t get worse, we discovered we had too much pasta or maybe it was too little sauce. Whichever it is the meal was much sadder looking than intended.
My dear father sat through it and ate it as did the two cooks. I would love to say that when putting it into my mouth I discovered that despite its appearance and failings in the making it tasted magical but it lived right up to expectations. It wasn’t inedible but I wouldn’t ever go back to a restaurant if they served me that.
Maybe my next cooking expedition will be better?
And my good friend who helped me cook has started her own blog and I enjoyed her first entry more than I should have so I’m expecting great things. So check it out: http://theycallmelazy.wordpress.com/
Plain Old Glasses 