Cooking for Uno

Gavin's out of town. Almost all of the time this means I will either eat out or eat something dumb, like porridge or frozen food, for dinner. It’s difficult to cook for one person and annoying when there is no one there to tell you what a tasty meal all of your hard work created. I decided yesterday I was going to cook for myself. My blog can be the thing that tells me what an excellent job all of my hard work produced! Had I thought about this in advance, I would have made a prettier meal, but sadly I didn’t foresee me photo-documentarying my cooking experiences when I did my shopping this week!

I use to think I was a bad cook and that was just a fact of life. I now realize I am not a bad cook. I was bad at following directions. It’s somewhat bizarre that this is true, since I almost always read my manuals cover to cover and am overall a great student. The problem is that I thought cooking should be easy, cheap, and efficient. Turns out cooking isn’t necessarily any of these things. Instead of reading the recipe before I started, I would just take the first step. This would often result in me desperately trying to cut up onion so I could add them after two minutes, etc. This is obviously very easy to fix once I put my ego in check and acknowledged that cooking was going to take some effort. I now have a system for cooking. Seems to me the most important step is preparing.

1. Get out all ingredients. This ensure I HAVE all ingredients and that I won’t be making a mad dash to the neighbors for some sugar.

2. Prepare all ingredients. This was previously irritating to me because I felt like I was wasting time chopping everything up front. Turns out it saves stress, food from burning, and a lot of effort. It does create some unnecessary dishes, but you can pretend you are on a cooking show adding things from little bowls!


3. Eat.


This particular recipe is not a keeper in my opinion. It was a Rachel Rays turkey potatoes and veggies in burgundy sauce recipe. It wasn’t bad, but I probably won’t make it again.

Tonight, its back to eating out. I don’t really have a choice as I have ceramics tonight and by the time I get home, I’ll barely have time to hug Penny before class!