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.