So all UCC events are cancelled from 3 pm on owing to the terrible weather. What does that mean?
Time to heat things up with a little help from my badass cooking skillz.
I had grand ambitions to make stew. I had equally grand ambitions to finish making my sweet potato casserole. Both take about 1.5 hours worth of combined cooking and prep time. Well, I like to think that I have a lot of patience. I'm like an earthquake in that I can take a lot of pressure until I unexpectedly blow up. Not so when it comes to anything food related. Give me a frying pan, a bit of thawed meat, and any vegetable...and I can whip you (but mostly me) up a delicious stir-fry in under 20 minutes. I'm not really into the delayed gratification thing. A pot for stewing and an oven for baking leads to dreams of doing--which I'm great at forsaking. But I'd been talking about the stew, and the casserole, and I was excited. Full steam ahead, I was going for it.
What ensued was the epitome of the common 'struggle bus'.
It was truly terrible. I was so excited to jump right into the stew that I forgot the key commandment from A Dummy's Guide to Cooking With Meat. Step 1: Defrost the meat. Oops. I remove my diced beef from the freezer, and, low and behold, it is a stiff block that would probably shatter if I dropped it. I try breaking it up via stabbing by kitchen knife. Beef does not budge. The only way I see this ending is badly, so I drop the idea with the knife and go stare at my computer screen like it will magically tell me what to do. All praise to The Google? Not so. I decide I'll put the stubborn meat back in the fridge and make the stew on Saturday. The most painful part of this decision is knowing that I got the meat yesterday and for some reason stuffed it in the freezer instead of the fridge. (What was that flutter at my ear? Could it be...common sense? Ah no, probably just that dumb fly, following me around like a piece of rotting fruit).
Dreams of stewed goodness dashed and mind in disarray, wymana desperately tries to salvage the afternoon by resorting to Plan B: Casserole. Wayward flour blots out the counter, interspersed with orange droplets of mashed sweet potato that look like I gave the kitchen some exotic strain of chicken pox. Clean, organized cooking practices? Please. When this girl goes cooking, it's go big or go home. (And we all know that she is a neurotic neat-freak, in which case she will do a bang-up job cleaning the kitchen afterwards following the same philosophy). And thus it follows. She beats those eggs, she crushes those walnuts in her bare fist, she accidentally uses up the rest of the communal butter (that's a lot of butter...damn). By the time I'm pouring the mixture into the pan, the counter is a mess and my roommates are giving the stove a wide berth. They come in with amused but apprehensive looks, asking how it's going. I have no idea what I am doing! In principle, I do. But it's a catchy theme from last term and sums up my flustered state perfectly. I realize that I am talking to myself when one comes in and gives me a strange look. You all right? Yep...sniffle...I just put it in the oven. Oh, I say. Yeah, I have a cold...I'm not actually overcome with emotion at my cooking endeavours. I think I've probably looked on the brink of tears all day due to sinus congestion.
Oven pre-heated, timer set, Energy Level +5000 playlist queued, cleaning targets acquired. The kitchen looks spotless by the time I'm done busting moves to the Step Up soundtrack.
The casserole is a delicious-looking bar of gold when the timer goes off. One apprehensive bite morphs into dinner. I savor it to the El Dorado theme song. And as of one hour ago, I don't have food poisoning. Which is a major plus, considering I may have seen a bit of red in the egg. But come to think about it, that might have just been the dye off the shell I dropped in.
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