Adventures in cooking, day 3
Day three has arrived, and somehow I've been more productive than I ever am. But let's not talk about that. This is about cooking. So today I attempted to make beef stew in our tiny dorm kitchen! I only set off the smoke detector once, so I think I'm doing pretty good! I still don't know what I'm doing when I'm cooking, but somehow it usually turns out pretty okay. But then again, I treat cooking like art: I have no idea what it's going to be until it is. Even though I know many techniques and can go on for hours about art, I still don't know what I'm doing, but hey, my art is pretty good, so I decide not to let my confusion in what I'm doing stop me when I'm cooking.
So at first, I read the meat package, and it said to coat the meat with flour and pepper. We don't have pepper. I forgot to get it, and it's really expensive. Especially for the grinders. I sometimes hate my mom for making it so I can't have anything other than that for pepper. Fuck. Anyways, so I did and the braised it in batches, when yes, the smoke detector did go off. But I opened a window and it stopped as soon as I did it. Anyways, I did that, and then put it in a pot, filled it with water, put some of that spice that I'm in love with (Northern Lights) and some flour to make it thicker, and then brought it to a boil 'cause if I try to simmer on this stove, the flame goes out.
Awwww yeah! Look at that! It looks so good! But wait - IT'S MISSING SOMETHING. What could that be?
MOTHER. FUCKING. VEGETABLES. That right there is half a sweet onion, a bunch of carrots for Aislinn to eat around, and a bunch of green beans for me to eat around. (It's only fair, yo.) So I continued to let it simmer and stew (heh heh) for a while to let it all become fully cooked and then:
WA-POW! MOTHER FUCKING BEEF STEW! Look at this beauty. It's all thick and nice with lots of meat and veggies. If it wasn't for the fact that I was going to make rice to go with it I would've eaten some right there. But, we only have one pot. One. So I had to wait for it to cool some before putting it into a container and then washing the pot. Still washing it, by the way, I just need to give it a good scrub, but then I got distracted by homework. Which then lead to cleaning up my side of the dorm. Because I was searching for a mug that was clean and in the back of the cupboard that I could not see, being 5'1". Oh well.