Storytime: The Cheese Disaster
So I like to refer to myself as the mad scientist of the kitchen; I don’t follow recipes, I never measure anything and I am perfectly content throwing an ingredient or two that might not typically go in the dish just to see what would happen.
That being said, I’m not a bad cook. I have enough experience in the kitchen to know how long to cook things and what foods go together.
My friends on the other hand don’t have that same ability
Now let’s talk about cheese sauce.
Despite my IBS and lactose intolerance, I love cheese. Especially with pasta. Unfortunately, I’m very used to making cheese sauce with my very Italian family and am thus used to having a lot of options for cheese. With Alfredo sauce, I’m used to always using both cream cheese and fresh Parmesan and am usually quite happy with my results.
So one day I, a poor college student, was making dinner with some friends who are also poor college students in their apartment. One of the girls wanted to have Alfredo sauce, which my soul, if not my body, is always ready for.
While they were getting out the measly ingredients they had in stock, I left to use the bathroom thinking that everything would be fine.
Big mistake.
When I got back, I found that they had dumped the motherload of crappy Parmesan dust into an empty pot on the stove on high. This had begun to burn and weld itself onto the poor pot and, their solution to their problem was NOT to add milk, NOT to turn down the heat but to begin pouring Mozzarella, their only other cheese, into the pot with the charred remains of the Parm dust. Which is the equivalent of putting out a fire with kerosene
Thankfully I was able to stop that fire before it grew any bigger and in two bounds turned down the heat, snatched away the Mozzarella and added milk to that baby before it was more cheese than pot.
Then, I ran into some problems. The Parm dust wasn’t able to fully melt into the milk which then made the sauce both too chunky and too thin. I added more Parm dust, I added a bit of Mozzarella, but nothing was working.
I decided to let one of my friends. take over while I ran to my apartment to get some more (better) ingredients.
Big mistake
While I was gone, one of my friends, let’s call her TS, made her way into the kitchen. Announced that she had found that the answer was flour and had inputted our measurements, which didn’t exist, to calculate the amount of flour to put in.
TS then added SIX TABLESPOONS of flour to the pot.
I showed up just as she was dumping the last tablespoon and felt my soul leave my body as I stared down at the wet viscous cheese dough that laid before me in that poor, long-suffering pot.
We got takeout instead
Fortunately, this story has a happy? ending
Because I hate wasting food, I ended up scooping the wet mess into a container and stuck it into my freezer for a few weeks until I felt like experimenting.
I ended up turning the cheese sauce into bread by adding more flour and some yeast. The bread looked and smelled normal enough but whenever anyone took a bite they would furrow their brow before going wide-eyed in shock when they recognized what the bread reminded them of.
motherfucking cheez its
So that’s how I ended up making cheez it bread out of a failed cheese sauce
And how I decided to never leave my friends alone in a kitchen again.
