Single Entity

I love to cook. Mostly I just putter around in the kitchen and hope things turn out for the best, but I really enjoy it. I'm comfortable in kitchens*. I usually resist the urge to blog about the things I cook, because how interesting could that really be? But last night we had some adventures in the kitchen that I was rather proud of.

It was an hour or so before MM was scheduled to show up. I'd told him that someone on the cooking rota would be making dinner, although it wouldn't be me because my turn had been the night before. But of course, exam-time disruptions in the rota meant that no one had planned on cooking. So there I was with a minimal amount of rice, some bread, a few mushrooms, two onions, and a bell pepper and no time to walk a mile to the store and back. S, looking through the cupboards with me, found R's leftover potatoes from baked potato night and a few more peppers. MT could contribute cheese, tomatoes, and chocolate. So we made it up as we went along.

For an appetizer, we sliced the potatoes into thin rounds and tossed them with olive oil, salt, and spices and baked them at about 390 degrees (rough conversion from Celsius) until they were crispy. Looking at our combined main course ingredients assembled on the counter, we decided what we could do with them. Our first step, naturally, was to saute the onions and mushrooms with some garlic (S helpfully turned up to stir them around once they were cooked and the heat was off). Then we toasted some bread in the oven and grated it to make breadcrumbs and added them to the onion and mushroom mix (we tried toasting the bread in the toaster first, and that...didn't work so well. We got bread chunks instead of crumbs). We scrounged for a carrot in the refrigerator, chopped it finely and added it for color. MT added some vegetable stock for flavor and texture, since it was getting dry, and then threw in tons of "Herbes de Provence", garlic salt, and sage. We halved the bell peppers and then stuffed them with our mixture, topped them with grated cheese, and stuck them in the oven until the cheese melted. Add some red wine (from a box, of course), and voila! A classy meal.

MM arrived in the middle of our panic, but was luckily just rather amused at our situation (and impressed by our inventiveness!). It was, in all, quite a culinary adventure. We had the attitide of "You have an ingredient that might work? Throw it in. Hopefully it will turn out well." Much more exciting than actually knowing what we were doing, and a success in the end. Excellent.


You know, this blog is quickly going to turn into a domestic-things type blog if Caroline keeps writing about sewing and I ramble as much as I want to about cooking. Quickly now, someone write about current issues! Start an intellectual discussion!

*I have to throw in the disclaimer though: this is not because I feel it's my rightful place! If I didn't like cooking, I damn well wouldn't. I do what I do because I like it, not because I'm anti-feminist. Okay? Okay.