In the Kitchen

Now that I have a kitchen i like, i have been inspired to actually cook! Mind you, i can only make a few things now and so I trying to broaden my capabilities! I started the other night with trying to make spaghetti. I checked out a recipe online and went at it. It looked pretty simple. it was going fine…i was rolling along chopping and letting sauce cook and simmer. The spaghetti noodles were about to be done so i went to grab the colander ….hmmm…cannot find the colander! what the hell?? yep, NO colander. I have no idea where it is. I had one at my old place and i already unpacked all the kitchen boxes so where could it be…? I still  don’t know. I had to somehow drain the spaghetti without using a colander which was um…interesting! Soon enough, I mixed noodles with sauce and sat down to eat my first real cooking in my new place. It was decent. The sauce ended up being not saucey enough and maybe needed some garlic (which recipe did not call for). Other than that, it was edible enough for me. I’ll try a different recipe next time cause I want to be able to make an awesome pot of spaghetti! 

My next stab at cooking was last night when I attempted to make Watercress Soup. I bought a new soup book from Borders for $6!  Why I picked this particular out of all  of them I don’t know. i guess cause it called for a very small amount of ingredients. and i had it before and remembered it tasting good. So, i’ve got all my ingredients and am pleasantly pulling the leaves from the watercress stalks (which is not all that pleasant). I looked at the recipe and was trying to figure out how many potatoes it called for. Here is how is it written in book: 8 oz/225 g potatoes. Is it 8 oz of potatoes? or 8 potatoes that each weigh 225 g? I’m sorry, but me and following recipes is still a very new thing so I didn’t know. it may be common sense to some, but not for this girl! I had a bag of potatoes and i looked at the info on them and each one was 148 g/5.3 oz. ok, so that helped. since i was scaling down the recipe in size, i just added 1 potato. OK. I was then ready to put the contents into blender. In the blender they go and after pushing the blend or whatever button, the top of blender almost entirely came off! Green stuff spouting out and spraying all over. Not too much, but you know what i mean! Not to mention, on my skin and it was HOT! Oh, well…i kept going with blending it and then i tried a different button on blender..i don’t know what it was now..maybe puree? THAT WAS EVEN WORSE. More green liquid spayed all over the counter. AHHHHHH….what is a wanna-be cook to do??? It looked pretty well blended by then, so i transferred to saucepan and re-heated a little, as recipe said. After spending MANY minutes cleaning up the green mess, I finally poured some in a bowl and tasted it. Well? Kinda watery and bland. I had some newly bought Point Reyes Blue Cheese so I added a bit of that and it made it a little better. Maybe I needed another potato? Oh well. I ate my bowl. I was still hungry. I went and got one slice of wheat bread, salami and jack cheese and ate that too. THAT WAS GOOD! 

AHHHHH….this little wanna-be chef is NOT gaining any confidence here…..but I know i must keep on. First, I gotta find the damn colander!!