Why I Hate Cooking

I am no domestic goddess. I have never pretended to be. When I was in 8th grade, I was banned from cooking in Home Economics because I set the oven on fire... twice. Then in 9th grade I blew up two microwaves (one in school, one at home). I can think of about three meals in my twenty-two year existance that have not resulted in disastor.

Despite my turbulant history, I decided to turn over a new leaf while in Ireland (mostly because if I didnt cook for myself, I might starve). Once I mastered pasta, omelettes, salads, and protein shakes, I decided to take it up a notch. Enter Mom with an email full of recipes.

I made my Mom's famous lentil loaf earlier this week which was actually really good (not quite as good as hers, but lets be serious). Today I was going for my own recipes I found online: Arugala salad with bleu cheese, chopped dates, and mandarin oranges, stuffed mushrooms, and sweet potato casserole. Now I'm sure Martha Stewart would criticize me from the start and say those three dishes do not compliment eachother, BLAH BLAH BLAH. However they sounded good to me so I went with it. Screw you Martha.

Salad- done. Piece of cake. Mushrooms- not too difficult and pretty damn yummy, though somehow I ran out of the filling too quickly. Onto the sweet potato casserole, the dish I was most looking forward to. Enter disastor.

I don't know how you "officially" tell if a sweet potato, or any potato for that matter, is done baking, but these ones were not. Because they were still a bit too hard after I peeled them, the whole mashing process was just ridiculous, made even more so by my piece of shit blender and lack of proper cooking utensils. When I was done, I made a not-so-educated guess as to which baking pan to put the mound of orange gooo in (the recipe did not say) and then covered the top with marshmallows. Well apparently I chose the wrong pan, because when I pulled the casserole out of the oven, it was a marshmallow casserole with a chunky sweet potato crust (the pan was too big). Ugh.

Tomorrow night its take-out.