Monday, August 30, 2010

Anyone can cook...from a recipe

I guess I'll admit that cooking can be fun. I pretty much never make anything more complicated than German pancake which is like five ingredients and you just have to mix them all and pour. So it was odd when I had a sudden urge to try something more involved. The urge came when Brooke asked what we should do for dinner. It popped into my head that I should try to make something. I went online, found some recipes, and told her that I would make dinner but we'd have to go get ingredients. She took out the shopping list and asked what we needed and was surprised by the first thing, a butternut squash, and further perplexed by dill weed and white pepper among others. Surely she was expecting me to say peanut butter or frozen pizza.

As an aside, our grocery store is finally selling two things you always want together in one convenient package. Batteries and glue sticks! Of....course?


When we got back I realized it was going to be a bigger project than I expected so I told Brooke she needed to help me, but I still wasn't going to tell what we were making. She could mostly figure it out but couldn't look at the recipe and had to just blindly do the tasks I said we needed to do, without knowing how it all fit together. Then I would do the finishing touches at the end. We were already hungry and it was six o'clock when we went to work. Then, with both of us doing stuff non-stop, TWO HOURS LATER we finally got to eat.

First was butternut squash soup. You're supposed to be able to write on it with cream but my lines obviously aren't very sharp. Maybe the soup's supposed to be thicker, but it was already pretty thick in my opinion. So that's a B for Brooke. The B for Ben on my first try turned out...let's say more abstract.

This is the entree. Chicken and a yam souffle deal and a chopped zucchini side that looked way better online than the green mush pile that mine was. Brooke says I minced when I was supposed to dice. It still tasted good. In fact I loved every single thing we made!

The dessert was a frozen strawberry/egg white/cream thing but I cooked the crust in a pan that was too big so the strawberry stuff spread out thinner than I wanted. But again, still good!

If I'm coming across as overly proud of an ok bit of cooking-that is spot on! Remember, I don't ever do this. I thought it was quite fun and maybe it tasted extra good because we were hungry when we began two hours earlier, but I really liked the whole experience regardless of the reason.

In conversations with Brooke, I have always insisted that, like that chef in Ratatouille says, anyone can cook. Then I clarify, anyone can cook...from a recipe. I suppose, like most things, there's the science and then there's the art. Well I now feel like I can recipe cook! And I liked it. Perhaps I will try it again sometime, maybe even without Brooke's help.

9 comments:

The White's said...

That's great, I think the only thing my husband has ever really made is cookies, can you count ramen noodles? Anyhow way to go!

christy said...

good job! that's a lot of work. let's see what did i make for dinner? i heated up some organic tomato bisque from costco and steamed some broccoli from costco and bought yummy breadsticks from pizza factory to go with it because i was afraid the ones i made from scratch would not turn out. my bread sticks are edible but nothing beats the ones from PF. mmm

Mrs. Mike said...

Oooooh! Fancy! It looks delicious. Good job!

When Mike compliments me on my cooking, I usually respond, "I just followed the recipe!" I don't feel like I can really take credit unless it's my own concoction. It's still fun to try new recipes, though!

Mrs. Mike said...

P.S. Duracell is getting into the glue stick business? Weird.

Fran said...

Ooooo! It all looks so good. Good job. As your mother I can testify that you never cooked except to pass a cub scout requirement. I am heartened by this feast. Maybe we need to plan another trip to visit.

christy said...

oh and i can testify that recipe cooking can go very wrong indeed so good job. also some recipes are bad, as if the writer never actually made it but just threw some random info together. so you are also lucky to have gotten a hold of decent recipes. so how many dirty dishes after all this? that would be my concern. lol

Benjipups said...

Yeah Christy, there were a ton of dishes and an overall huge mess. Besides the dishes, I'm not good at keeping things I'm chopping contained on the cutting board, plus we were using a hand held electric mixer in too small a bowl at one point so every now and then stuff would go flying out. I should have taken a picture of the kitchen afterwards.

Janell said...

I am so impressed! That dinner looked delicious.

Adam and Hilary said...

All of the food looks so good! It's making my tummy hungry. Next time invite the Heaths. :)