Frustrated Foodies Cover their Eyes

 Imagine you are the parent of this child, you might tell Tommy that he needs to stop playing with his dinner and eat it, or you might laugh and give yourself a little linguini facial as well. Of course Tommy isn't taking a crack at your delicious dinner, he is after all, like two years old, and you DID give him a messy plate of spaghetti. If you think about it from a different angle, you might feel like giving up and playing with the food you cooked instead of eating it. Do you ever feel like this? Does your spaghetti/linguini ever turn out in such a mess you just want to cover your eyes with it? I've heard that cooking is supposed to be a relaxing and even religious experience, but most of the time I only find it to be frustrating (see below post). Cooking should feel something like this. You should feel rested and relaxed and proud of what you made and want to share that with others. Sometimes, it just doesn't happen that way. Sometimes we have to cover our eyes because the oozy goozy yucky mess we made scares us and if we can't see it then it doesn't exist, right?

I propose that frustrated foodies unite! Don't throw your spaghetti against the wall, it isn't garbage! We can fix it. Food can be saved. My mother and I have a saying about baking cakes, "If the cake looks terrible, just make double the frosting. No one will know the difference". Let's come back into the kitchen, take the towel, plate, handful of noodles, from our eyes and fix our food problems.

Burnt Toast (About this Blog)

"I did it," I thought to myself, "I set my house on fire". I ran through the living room into the kitchen to the source of the foul smelling smoke, the toaster oven. I flipped the knob every which way, trying to make it ding, the ding that meant this horrible machine was turned off. I couldn't even see my breakfast, it was gone, the horrible machine beast had eaten it, I was sure. I opened the door of the oven, letting out more foul smelling smoke. There was my toast, the toast I only had meant to reheat (who wants to eat cold toast?), it was pitch black. No nice golden brown marks that taste so savory with butter, oh no, this toast was burnt like ash. What was I going to do with it? Throw it in the trash? Surely not. I did what any other sensible person would do, I grabbed the nearest pair of tongs and ran the said pieces of burnt mass out into the cold and threw them in the snowy garbage can. As I was fanning the smoke from my house, I realized, "How bad of a cook am I if I can't even reheat toast?"

Sadly, this is only one of the many instances that I've had with not being able to produce delicious food. I've tried to make pancakes when the stove wasn't on, I've tried making spaghetti without boiling water, and the list goes on and on. I hope to not only share some of these stories with you, but also to share my journey in learning how to cook. There are recipes that I have made up that have gone well such as Pineapple Guacamole (more on that later) and countless others that haven't. Maybe together we can learn to cook sophistically, and share recipes and techniques that are and are not successful. Tell me what you have tried to make and what you have always wanted to make. Tell me your favorite dishes and the worst thing you ever made. I will certainly tell you mine. I know I'm not a lost cause on cooking yet, there's still hope for me as long as there are people like me out there that can still burn the bread out of toast.