Culinary experiments.

One of the major complications that arose from having moved out of my parents' house is the fact that I don't know how to cook. I mean, I really don't know how to cook. Up until this past spring I had never made an egg. And so, finally finding myself unable to rely on mom and dad for dinner, I resolved to develop my own culinary skills once and for all.

I've been trying my hand at cooking for a few weeks now. And it is not going well.

Let's start with breakfast. Breakfast is supposed to be simple. I thought that making eggs would be a no-brainer - turn on the stove, throw some butter in a pan, dump the egg in, wait until it looks cooked. Wrong. Apparently you can't just crank up the flame and nuke your eggs into submission - that produces a thin layer of burnt butter, a cloud of black smoke, and a half-cooked pile of egg fused to the middle of the pan. Which is sort of edible, but really doesn't look like the eggs mom used to make. After many desperate attempts, I finally consulted my brother via GChat. He suggested a lower flame and more butter under the egg than around it. When I get around to buying more eggs, I'll see how that works.

Then comes lunch. Sandwiches. How hard can it be to make a sandwich? Well, when you put your grilled cheese in the pan and then forget about it, pretty damn hard. Now my frying pan has a bread-shaped black spot in the middle. Other than that, though, I have managed to whip up some random stir-fried assortments of tofu, brocolli, garlic, and rice without much damage to the kitchen (though I did manage to get Mexican rice seasoning in both eyes last Monday night - that's quite a burning sensation).

But dinner has proven to be the most challenging. Last weekend, Sarah and I had a night of ambition - we invited two friends over to make a chicken with brocolli and mashed potatoes. Many things went wrong.

First of all, the fucking chicken took over two hours to defrost. We tried running it under water, letting it float around in a sink full of water (who knew chickens floated?), sticking it in the microwave, poking it with forks to break up the frozen chicken flesh that refused to die ... and nothing worked. We had to sit and look at it. Forever.

But once the chicken finally reached room temperature, we seasoned it (with butter, garlic powder, salt and pepper) and stuck it in the oven. Despite generating enough smoke to set off the fire alarm (twice), it came out pretty damn good.

The mashed potatoes posed their own challenge, in that we didn't own a potato peeler or masher at the time (we have since learned from our mistakes and aquired these two items). But, even after peeling piping hot boiled potatoes by hand (ouch) and then mashing and seasoning them with a tiny fork (this takes much more bicep strength than you would think), we ended up with a great dish.

And, despite our track record for the night, the brocolli was painless and easy. So, after four hours and two bottles of wine (perhaps that was our first mistake), we had a great dinner. Maybe next time we'll spend less time cooking and more time eating - or at least hold off on the wine until after we're done cooking.