A Realistic Cooking Experience: How to Salvage a Dinner

This is the recipe I used for the experience, but I feel the sentiments could be extended to include most recipes. And since this is already a lengthy post, I'll just dive right into it.

Instructions:

1. Boil some water for the brown rice. Throw in a few handfuls of rice because you aren’t sure how much uncooked rice makes a cup of cooked rice and you’re too lazy to look it up. Turn down the heat, cover, and simmer until the rice is done.
2. Realize that you do not have a can of tomato/chile mixture. Find a 4 ounce can of chiles in the pantry. Find 2 more. Find a tomato. Realize that making a half and half mixture of chiles to tomatoes would mean unused chiles. Declare that a sin and decide a 2 to 1 ration in favor of chiles is better than equality. Open 2 of the cans and shake the chiles into a bowl. Dice the tomato and put the tomato bits into one of the chile cans so you can have exactly 4 ounces of tomato. Put that in the bowl. Pride yourself on your math, then boldly state, “What’s an extra ounce of food, anyway?”
3. Decide you don’t have the time to thaw out and cook the chicken from the freezer. Find a jar of chicken your mom canned earlier that year, also in the pantry. Look for the can opener you’ve already lost. Use the can opener to open the jar of chicken, and dump out the juices. Wrinkle your nose at the suspicious tuna smell and decide to wash the chicken off. Shred it up and put it in the bowl with the tomatoes and chiles.
4. Look for frozen corn in the freezer, then resort to a can of corn from the pantry because you’ve run out of the frozen stuff. Find the once-again-lost can-opener and open your corn. Measure out a cup of it and add that to the bowl.
5. Pull out a bag of frozen spinach because your raw spinach went bad two days ago. Try to separate the clumps with your fingers, decide you aren’t strong enough, and resort to the paring knife. After you get a cup of chunks, add that to the bowl too.
6. Measure out a cup of rice. Pride yourself on successfully making enough rice for the recipe and decide you’ll eat all the leftovers another time.
7. Mix up your mixture. Realize you weren’t supposed to put the tomatoes and chiles in there and decide it can’t be fixed. Check the recipe to see if you’ve ruined it, and pride yourself on the fact that the sauce and the stuffing were eventually going to be mixed together anyway. Move on to making the sauce.
8. Decide you don’t want to get your only tablespoon dirty and pretend you measured 2 tablespoons of butter. After that melts, pretend you scooped out 2 tablespoons of flour into the butter.
9. Stir it up until you get a buttery ball of flour. Wonder why you have to cook it for 3 minutes. Flatten it out so you can cook the middle stuff. Try to shake-stir the flour mixture like they do on TV. Watch as the butter cake doesn’t move and put the saucepan back down in shame.
10. Decide it’s probably been 3 minutes. Find a can of chicken broth. Look for the can-opener that’s gotten lost again, and use it to open the chicken broth. Wonder if the can-opener has ulterior motives and eye it as you dump the broth onto your butter cake.
11. Start stirring with the wooden spoon you’ve been using. Wonder if you did this wrong. Stir for a long time before looking at your whisk and wondering if that will fix things. Decide you don’t want to wash the whisk, but grab it anyway and whisk your sauce. Watch the clumps of flour cake disappear and congratulate yourself on saving the sauce from disaster.
12. Add the 4 ounces of cream cheese. Congratulate yourself on buying the whipped stuff instead of the block stuff because now it’s ten times easier to whisk it all in.
13. Realize you forgot to buy sour cream. And extra cheese. Wonder if 2 cups of cheese will still be okay and decide you’re too far in the recipe to go back now. Wonder if you can stop and go to the store, then decide your husband will be home before you can get back. Decide to substitute more cream cheese for the missing sour cream.
14. Lament your forgetfulness as you look at the recipe for how much of this ingredient you need. Wonder why the recipe author used ounces for the cream cheese and cups for the sour cream. Shrug, and incorporate the extra cream cheese into the sauce.
15. Decide that this isn’t as enchilada-esque as you’d like it to be. Fail to find enchilada sauce in the pantry and opt for the last can of green chiles. Mix that into the sauce and taste it. Immediately stop regretting the sour cream omission and congratulate yourself for the decision to add the chiles. Take the sauce off the heat.
16. Mix a few handfuls of cheese into the stuffing. Decide you should put in a little more, and mix that in too.
17. Take the five bell peppers out of the fridge that you never got around to eating as snacks, which necessitated this recipe in the first place. Cut them in half, cut off the tops, remove the seeds and that gross white stuff, and imagine the peppers screaming in agony as their insides are torn out. Wonder if you’re secretly a psychopath.
18. Look in one place for the roasting pan someone got you for your wedding. Give up and opt for a cake pan instead. Grease the cake pan.
19. Arrange the pepper halves so they all have the open part facing up. Admire your Tetris skills. Stop and allow a moment of sadness in remembrance of the 90s (though Tetris was around for a bit before then).
20. Turn up the volume on your music, feel like a daredevil for having the volume at 25%, then realize your neighbor yells at her kids a lot and decide you don’t care if she can hear your music. She needs happier things in her life. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
21. Run to the charger because your laptop is about to die and you still need the recipe.
22. Proceed to fill the bell peppers with the stuffing. Wonder how big the bell peppers were that the recipe’s author used. There’s way too much stuffing left over.
23. Wonder why the author wanted you to make so much sauce, then read further down and see that you're supposed to put the rest on the bottom of the pan. Proceed to do so. Sprinkle the rest of your cheese onto the bell peppers and put them in the oven. 
24. Wait out the most torturous 35 minutes of your life. Wait another handful of minutes for the food to cool down. Proceed to eat. Congratulate yourself on successfully making something, then wish you had more of that sauce. Wish the whole thing were made of that sauce. 
25. Take a picture and wonder if you can use the rest of the stuffing for a batch of mini enchiladas. Realize you’re about to commit to another cooking disaster and decide you’ll just use it as a dip.
26. Realize you don’t have chips.