Hello. My name is Kailey and basically...I don’t know what I’m doing in the kitchen. So what do I do to fix this? Oh, try and cook something complicated for a guy I had recently started dating; good idea, right? No.
Let me give you some background here; I moved into a cute, little (dumpy) apartment with a new friend of mine. We were easily becoming best friends and she introduced me to her boyfriend’s best friend and we all started hanging out together. The boys were on the football team and were at an away game for the weekend, so we decided that we would make them dinner for the night they came home from their trip. Previous to this night (incident) I had never made a boy dinner before - I was a strong independent woman who didn’t need a man! Or just had commitment issues, either one.
So my roommate made me think this was a good idea, and we set forth to make hamburger stew. It seemed easy enough, we found the recipe on Pinterest and started throwing ingredients in a giant pot on the stove. The first issue we had was poor planning. See, this was supposed to be a crockpot meal that slow cooked over 8 hours or so, but we had been out all day and forgot to start it in the morning. By the time we got back, it was too late to crockpot it, so we improvised and figured it would be fine on the stove. Wrong. And my smoke alarm wasn’t afraid to tell me how wrong we were. No matter what I put on that stupid stovetop, the smoke alarm, which was literally directly above the stove, would let the people of our neighborhood know that I was cooking and they should stay indoors, prepared with a fire extinguisher. Somehow, the stew did not catch on fire so we threw in the potatoes and it was smelling and looking good! We brought the pot to their house, threw it on the stove on low to keep it warm and ran to the store down the street to grab some bread to go with it. Maybe ten minutes later we came back to check on it and the potatoes started to mush together...looking worse as we stirred it. So now, we were sitting in their kitchen, staring at our slump, waiting for them to walk in the door - oh and this was a surprise, they had no idea we were doing this for them - praying to the cooking gods that maybe the potatoes would stop mushing. They didn’t; this stew now looked like mashed potatoes mixed with peas and corn.
The boys walked in, confused but happy to see us, and when we told them there was food ready they were stoked. Until we put the potato mush in their bowls and they didn’t quite know what to do.They said, “it’ll eat,” and dug in like the nice people they are; or they were just starving. The boy I had recently started dating took a bite, asked for some salt and kissed me on the cheek as a sympathetic “thank you for making me mush.” And he never spoke to me after that… just kidding, we’ve been dating ever since. But he does get a little weary when I try to cook something new.
