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.

Easy No Sugar Added Blackberry Lemonade Punch

This was a treat to look forward to. We were having company for dinner, and I thought I might try my hand at making some punch. Boy, we were not disappointed!

I've been trying to cut back on my sugar intake, since lately my body has not been able to handle it as well as it used to. My hope with this punch was that it would be naturally sweet enough to satisfy my sweet tooth without killing my metabolism. And it worked, but I won't deny that it might have been because of the sugars that were already in the juice and the fruit. But I was okay with that because my goal here was not to add any sugar to this, but I had no objection to sugars that were already there. If you have qualms with store-bought lemonade, you could probably make this work with homemade lemonade.

Ingredients:
-1 bottle of Simply Lemonade (or lemonade of your choice)
-2 small containers of blackberries
-3 cans of lemon seltzer water
-1 sliced lemon, to taste

Directions:
1. Empty the blackberries into a freezer safe container or plastic bag. Mash some, if not all, of them for better disbursement of juices. Put the blackberries in the freezer until they are cold or entirely frozen. We did this so we wouldn't have to water the lemonade down with ice, but you don't have to freeze the berries.
2. Pour the lemonade into your serving container of choice (we put ours in a drink dispenser)
3. Add the berries
4. Add desired amount of lemon slices.
5. Add cans of seltzer water. We added cans one at a time until we found a punch flavor we were happy with. Feel free to reduce or add cans of seltzer water.
6. Mix and serve.

We saved the Simply Lemonade bottle for leftovers and we had just enough to refill it. It tasted just as good the next day.

A Thought a Day

February is just around the corner, which means the holiday of hearts is about to make its annual appearance. This year I thought I'd do something a little special, since I've recently graduated college and have a lot more free time on my hands. And since Clark will likely take on the strenuous task of planning a special Valentine's date, I thought I might ease his stress by making him feel special every day until Valentine's Day (not that I'm saying my efforts are equal to what he'll be doing. Planning dates is way harder than writing notes). The hubster's love language is gifts, so I thought his daily special could involve a little something with a note attached. So much love, right? 

Here's what I did:

Step 1: Buy stuff.

For those curious about what I bought, here's my list.

1. Swedish Fish (his favorite candy) to start the month off
2. Beef jerky
3. Pistachios
4. Trail mix
5. Chocolate pretzels
6. Mexican soda
7. White cheddar popcorn seasoning
8. Mini deodorant
9. Reese's Pieces
10. Gum
11. Popcorn
12. Hershey's Almonds
13. Some sort of dinosaur (yet to be purchased)
14. And day 14 would be a mega basket of movie-related things. I'd include a picture, but I haven't gotten around to assembling it yet.

The next step was to write the notes.

(This is the part where I apologize for how utterly horrible my camera is.)

Here are my awful love puns:

1. Swedish Fish: You're the best fish in the sea
2. Beef Jerkey: Ooh, your muscles are so beefy
3. Pistachios: In a nutshell, you're my favorite
4. Trail mix: You know the trail to my heart
5. Chocolate pretzels: You twist my heart in knots (in a good way)
6. Mexican soda: I soda like you.
7. Cheesy Popcorn seasoning: We have cheesy good fun
8. Mini deodorant: I can't wait to smell you later
9. Reese's Pieces: I love you to pieces
10. Gum: I'm stuck on you (other options were "you're extra special," for the gum brand of that name, or "thanks for chewsing me")
11. Popcorn: I'm glad you popped the question
12. Hershey's Almonds: I'm nuts about you
13. Dinosaur: You're dino-mite
14. And I'm still deciding if I want to put a pun on the basket.

And that was it. The next part was just to give him one a day until Valentine's Day.

(again with the awful camera)

Until next time!

Writing Prompt #22

I wasn't really one to purchase writing books, as any information in them I could likely find on the Internet. However, I was on a date with the spouse and we found a section on writing in a bookstore. Most of the books were about journalism, but I found one I could potentially use and bought it.

I have absolutely fallen in love with this book.

It has personality traits and psychological profiles for all kinds of characters, as well as several prompts for you to create characters and situations using the information you just learned. I have a feeling my writing is going to go in a completely new direction.

And so, in this wave of excitement, I've developed today's writing prompt with a focus on characters.

definition of solipsism: the theory or belief that you are all that exists. Therefore, a solipsist is someone who believes this.
definition source: Oxford English Dictionary, definition 2  http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/184295#eid22038490

Writing Prompt #21

College is over and done with, and now I find myself confronted with a lot of free time. Sure I still work, but now that there's no homework and studying I have a lot of time to fill. Naturally, I'll be writing, but now and then I have to take a break, and what will I do with myself? That's the crisis of my life.

Today's writing prompt doesn't come from a book. I was thinking about the fact that my most recent ideas are all about the beginning, and there's no end in sight. Not that that's a bad thing. Ray Bradbury, for example, began Farenheit 451 with just a concept: the protagonist's job is to burn books. Then, after writing a bit, Bradbury realized that his character wasn't the type to burn books, and so the rest of the story was born. I figure that's how my idea is going to pan out (not that I'm saying I write on the same level as Ray Bradbury. I have a lot more ground to cover before that can happen).

But endings. They sometimes are frustrating. They sometimes leave us wishing there would be more of the story, but knowing that the story has ended well. Sometimes we feel alienated from everything that happened in the book, just as the author intended it to be. Perhaps these endings happen by accident, but I like to believe some of them were planned. So today the prompt is all about the ending, starting with it and working backwards to get the story.

Writing Prompt #20

Well, it's been a super long chunk of weeks. I'm talking triple the homework load kind of long, the type of long that lets you dream of getting 5 hours of sleep a night. I got through it, thankfully, and now there is less than a month until my graduation ceremony, which also means less than a month for all of my pending homework assignments to be turned in. I'm really looking forward to a month of not sleeping.
On the brighter side, now that that mess of homework is done with I had time to create another writing prompt.

Pumpkin M&M Cookies

It's the season of pumpkins, and since Halloween is over all the Halloween candy went on sale. We picked up some discount M&Ms and I thought it was high time to make some cookies. Then I had the bright idea to put pumpkin in it.

-¾ cup butter

-1 cup brown sugar (dark), packed

-1 egg

-1 tsp vanilla

-½ cup pumpkin

-A heaping tablespoon of corn starch (for less-cakey cookies, omit this)

-¾ tsp baking soda

-1 tsp salt

-2 cup flour

-A dash of pumpkin spices (nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves) How much you put into this is up to you, but try to keep the amount of cinnamon double the ratio of the other spices. (ex. ½ tsp cloves= 1 tsp cinnamon)

-As many m &m’s as you view to be non-Satanic (or about 1 ½ cups to  a package of them)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Cream the butter and sugar.

Add the egg, vanilla, and pumpkin.

Mix in your dry ingredients.

Add the M&Ms.

Drop onto cookie sheets and bake for 15-20 minutes in the oven.

Note: it took about 20 minutes to bake, but to be safe I would start at 10 minutes and work up from there. I still haven't figured out if my oven is messed up or not.

Writing Prompt #19

This next one was one of the first library snippets I wrote down. When I read it I got the sense of disappointment from what they were saying. But at the same time I saw the potential for joy, for delight that it was a boy. So I suppose it's up to the individual writer how this line is to be taken.

Writing Prompts #13-18

I've been in a writing prompt mood today. Rather than blow up the blog feed with post after post, I've decided to put the rest of today's writing prompts in one post.

Here we have the story of Billy. He's had an operation, yet to be determined, and now he's down for a nap. Why did he need an operation? Where's he going after he recovers?

Science fiction, has at times, changed the way humanity views the world and the future. In some cases the science fiction tells a tale of progress and a better way of living, but in other cases science fiction tells us about the darker sides of humanity. Where do these uncontrollable items fall? Salvation or destruction? Or is it yet to be revealed?

The Princess Bride is a tale of true love, and it has echoed through generations. My mother introduced the movie to me. I plan to introduce it to my children. The story is timeless (even if the special effects are not.) There's something about love that makes people want to read the story, as evidenced by Twilight's popularity (but don't ask me to give a rave review of that particular story) and Disney's tendency to turn horrific tales of murder and frustrated dreams into beloved romances (The Little Mermaid, Sleeping Beauty, The Snow Queen, etc.) We even like to watch stories of lost love, like One Day. So what kind of love is this prompt about?

Ah, the concept of memory. It's such a convenient tool for a storyteller to slip backstory into the current tale. What's this memory about?

In this prompt, try writing in the second person. Was it challenging, or did it strangely feel like the natural thing to do? There have been stories that have made use of the second person, like Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, and not the third person impersonal that some people mistake second person to be. If you need help, perhaps imagine that you're watching someone go about their day, the day of their grandfather's funeral. What do they look like? What do they do? How do they feel?

I'm not sure how much introduction this prompt needs. To me it seems to be a narrator who's addressing the reader directly, like a friend. But perhaps this is too ambiguous?

Writing Prompt #12

I found this line a while ago and have been obsessed with it ever since. There's so many things that this could be referring to, and no matter what it is that's being used, we don't know how to use it. The implications of the ignorance are up to the writer, but I think there's no doubt that this line implies implications.

Writing Prompt #11

Villains. Dirty heroes. A love that never happens because a character's morals are too gray. These tragedies of humanity are elements that draw me into stories, and this is today's writing prompt. If you write about a villain, make him self-aware (by him, I mean it in the neuter form. Pick what gender you wish). Make him know he's a villain, that he's causing harm, and make him do it anyway. Make him have reasons to go against his principles. Give him a choice to be bad. If you choose to write about a hero, why is he bloodthirsty? Is he one of those types that should be a villain, but he got what he wanted in the end? Here's a chance to develop a 'deeper' character.

Pumpkin Puree

This was quite the adventure, and it's only half over! Halloween was just last weekend, and in the spirit of this holiday my spouse and I bought a pumpkin. We didn't end up carving it. So, post-Halloween I have a Jack O'Lantern size pumpkin with no reason to carve it (aside from my own enjoyment.) Naturally the solution to my problem was to turn this pumpkin into a delightful mush for use in pies, cookies, pancakes, ice cream, breads, and anything else I could think of. And so my adventure began.

Method 1:

Step 1: Remove the stem. As you can see, this was a very large pumpkin.

Step 2: Carve out the insides. I apologize for not having a picture. I'd actually done this step a few days ago with the intention of carving the pumpkin. That never happened. Instead, I stuck the pumpkin in the fridge, which was to cause unforeseen complications with this process later.

Step 3: Slice the pumpkin into pieces. I still had a bit of inside-gutting to do.

It was after this step that I discovered that this type of pumpkin is made up entirely of stringy pieces, which may change the texture of my finished product.

Step 4: Into the oven! The oven should be preheated to 350 degrees. The directions I was following said this step should take about 45 minutes, but since I'd put the (open and gutted) pumpkin in the fridge for a few days, it had dried out. About an hour and a half into the baking process my spouse, the engineer, suggested I put water on the pumpkin slices. They mushified within ten minutes.

Step 5: Scrape away the flesh.

Step 6: Process the mush however you wish, whether it's a beater, food processor, blender, or other fancy kitchen device. If your pumpkin is kind of dry, it's suggested to mix in a bit of water to get it to your desired texture. Too moist? Put it in a strainer or cheesecloth to drain away some excess fluid. By the end of this step you should have your pumpkin puree.

Step 7: Cook or store as you please. Since we ended up with so much pumpkin, we decided to put the extra scrapings into Ziploc bags and stored it in the freezer. This is pre-mushified pumpkin pulp.

Method 2:

Since the pumpkin was so big, I ended up only processing half of it in my first try. This gave me the opportunity to soak the extra pieces in water in hopes of rehydrating them, and a new process unfolded.

Follow steps 1 to 3 as shown above. 

Step 4: Place the pieces of pumpkin in a Ziploc bag (or bowl, if you prefer), fill it with water, and store overnight in the fridge.

Step 5: Put into a 350 degree oven for 45 minutes, or as long as is needed for the flesh to be soft enough. I ended up having to pour water on it, as before, but this time it only took an extra twenty minutes to cook.

This is what mine looked like when I took it out.

Steps 6 through 7 are the same as above.

Writing Prompt #10

Oh Wednesday. I think I'd enjoy it more if I got enough sleep last night, but there was incident involving a roasting pumpkin and I had to wait around for that to be dealt with before I could go to bed. So at midnight I plop down to sleep, and at about five in the morning something metal was crashing into our roof. At about seven thirty someone hopped up there to fix it, and by that time my body was done getting woken up and I was obliged to start the day. So, on the subject of incidents and happenstances, here's the next prompt:

An Apology

In redesigning my blog, my previous post about banana bread was deleted. I apologize to anyone who wanted to make this delicious treat and couldn't find the recipe. I have some bananas in the freezer ready for the baking, so I promise the post will be up again soon, with pictures. (By soon, I mean by the end of the week. I've got a few homework assignments that are bit higher on the priority lists.)

Writing Prompt #9

Today's prompt hunt was an exciting one. The temperatures dropped down here in Arizona and for the first time this semester I got to wear a jacket and scarf. Since the library was heated, I had no need to wear a jacket and had dropped it on the floor when wandering the bookshelves. The books I stood by weren't very inspirational, so I decided it was time to move on. Rather than pick up the jacket, I decided to kick it ahead of me and search the books near where it landed. (No jackets were harmed in this endeavor). This jacket found me some good lines. So, on the subject of useful objects, today's prompt involves focusing on an object.

Writing Prompt #8

It seems every other day I have a major assignment due, which means I'm in for a long haul of not sleeping. That's where the best ideas come from, right? I hope I can get through this without going insane. But everything coming due means that graduation is just around the corner, and I think that's the part of this I need to focus on.
For this writing prompt, I was so struck by the things I found in this book that I wrote down the title to read it after the craziness of graduation is over. So your ideas about this lovely sentence may be tainted by the source material.

Writing Prompt #7

This prompt is due to a very lazy Sunday. I must have laid around two hours now trying to find things to fill the time. I feel ideas stirring so perhaps it's only a matter of time before the words start coming in.

Writing Prompt #6

We just got done with a scary movie night and I'm trying to take my mind off of scary things. Maybe my heart is racing because of the caffeine? Either way, my mind is going a mile a minute and I had to churn something out. But then, I couldn't find my flash drive that has every writing project I've started since I was eleven (not ready to trust cloud storage yet. Call me crazy.) I assume I just left it at work again, but until then I have to fly blind and write a random scene, instead of continuing where I left off. But in the spirit of scary movies and the tail-end of Halloween weekend, here's my next prompt:

Writing Prompt #5

I'm a little excited about this prompt. When I opened the book for this one (I think it was a novelized movie script) and saw this line, I knew I had to write it down. There's so many directions you could go with this, no matter what genre you write. Perhaps it's because this prompt is only one word.

Writing Prompt #4

This next batch of prompts comes from the top floor of the University of Arizona library. After my internship I wander through the shelves, selecting random books and writing the sentences that stand out to me. It makes for great thinking material.