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.

Life in the Now

Quick rant: My wedding is only 60 days away! There are a lot of things to be thankful for in this time of engagement, but a lot of stressful things to plan too. Like, a lot. And at the end of the day I think to myself, "I never want to see another centerpiece design again!" But when everything's said and done, I'll still be married to that guy I love, so I suppose throwing a fancy party for everyone else will be worth it.

But there's definitely a reason elopement is so glamorized.

Anyways, on to my intended post. On the day before Valentine's Day I entered a national poetry contest on a whim, expecting to be politely let down because someone else's poetry is "better" than mine. And I was. But I didn't expect to receive an email that said "your poetry was selected for a citation in recognition of its quality". I thought to myself "That's so cool! ...What in the world is a citation in recognition of quality?" So I did a little research. It turns out that there were 3 judges, and each judge had to select their top six poetry collections and rank them from 1-10. I can't say how the judges rated mine, but the fact that I was selected means that somebody liked it enough to rank it in their top six. When all was said and done, did I end up in the top six? No. I did, however, end up in the top ten. So, my random whimsical adventure landed me a place among the top ten collegiate poets in the nation.

I learned from this experience that I know how to work the English language and make people like it. I can write. (Not that I ever couldn't, but now I have proof from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies that I most definitely can work the laptop keys.) And when a person like me gets to the point where it's been nationally recognized that said person can write, it's time to move forward.

And so for the big announcement: I'll be entering a short story contest. For some, this seems like no big deal, but I've had this contest on the back of my mind for two years now and haven't had any material that I felt was good enough for it. Now I do. I have an awesome story idea, I have proof that my writing skills are superb, and now I just have to get through the drafting process and send it off. This long-time dream can suddenly be a reality.

Some of you still might be thinking that it's no big deal. It's just a contest. True. It is. But one of the judges for this particular contest is Orson Scott Card. You know, the guy that wrote Ender's Game? He's kind of a big deal, which makes this contest kind of a big deal. Last year's winners got to meet the cast of the Ender's Game movie. So in the world of writing, this is a big deal. It's quite the scary prospect, but it's high time I take a risk.

Introduction

Never did I think of myself as the blogging type of person. I probably wouldn't have done this if my Pinterest page hadn't started taking off. Yes, I don't have many Pinterest followers, but in the past month one pin alone has gained 140+ repins and counting. I figure if I can affect people like that with a simple picture of what seems to be a raspberry cinnamon roll, how much could I do with a blog?

Some of this will be profound. Some.... less so. I may post internet funnies, recipes, life updates, inspirational words or maybe even a fictional story or two, depending on what whim I choose to entertain. I am a random person about to create a random blog and the possibilities are endless.

As far as personal introductions are concerned, I just finished my second year at the University of Arizona and have just three semesters left before I graduate in Creative Writing. Yes, Creative Writing. It seems like a useless major and a cop out in life, but we CWs have a lot more influence than one might think. With college more than halfway over, big decisions are in store for me and it's scary to think that I'll be starting a whole new life by the end of next year, but it's an exciting notion all the same.

My favorite author of all time is Edgar Rice Burroughs, who had a stroke of genius and wrote a book called "Tarzan of the Apes", which led to at least 24 sequels and a well-known Disney movie. Of the Tarzan series my favorite book would be "Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar" because Tarzan gets amnesia and forgets most everything about himself, which leads to an intense plot of daring adventure and a search for identity. Someday I will own every one of his books from "The Princess of Mars" (another amazing one) to "The Land that Time Forgot", but until that point I'll be haunting the old books sections of any book store and thrift shop I can find.

Some may wonder why I like him so much. I'll just have to plead the fifth on that one and have people read his books for themselves. I will say, however, that he takes the same characters (a tall, muscular man of honor and a beautiful woman who is all loveliness and gentility) and puts them into most every novel and gets a new story every time. (See Tarzan, The Princess of Mars, The Lost Continent, The Monster Men, The Mad King, etc. for examples.)

While on the subject of books I'll just take a moment to say that I'm a big fan of the classics and have only just finished reading "Dracula". (After many reading excursions into the wee hours of the morning, I might add) It's one of those stories that once you get into it you can't put it down until you finish it, but some people might be put off by the type of language used and the fact that the story is told through a bunch of journal entries.

To end this very first ramble of mine I'll share the link to the recipe that started this all for anyone curious to know what it is. It looks rather tasty, though I haven't tried it quite yet owing to being busy with school and work. Who knows? Maybe it'll rank up there with my banana bread (which will eventually find its way on here).