College Cooking 101: What NOT to do

Now that Jessica and I are living on our own and have a decent kitchen to use, we are becoming or trying to become chefs. Our moms are both great cooks so naturally we wanted to carry on the family tradition. During the first weeks in our kitchen, we literally looked like chickens running around with our heads cut off. Maybe it was a mother’s instinct but our moms always seemed to answer their cell phones when we needed them to help bail us out of our cooking disasters. Luckily for us they did answer because we may not have had an apartment if they hadn’t.

I don’t want to brag or anything, but I think I have become quite a good chef within the last couple of months. I make a mean guacamole and an utterly delightful pomodoro sauce. Out of all the food items in the world to mess up on my story involves trying to boil eggs. Boiling eggs seems easy enough, let the eggs boil for about five to ten minutes let them cool in the water for about another fifteen minutes. Well, I don’t know what was going on in my mind at the time, but for some reason the eggs didn’t boil quite the right way. I called my mom to see if there was any way to “re-boil” the eggs and she suggested putting them in the microwave for about twenty or so seconds. I take the eggs out of the microwave and I try to peak into the egg to see if the yolk had been cooked. As I peer into the egg all of a sudden there is this huge “pop” sound and the next thing I know there is half cooked yolk all over my face, my hair and on my counter-top. Needless to say, my face had been quite close to the egg when it exploded. Oh, and I had been on the phone with my mom during the whole debacle and the funny thing was she didn’t seem the least bit concerned when she heard me yelp through the other end of the phone.

Jessica’s infamous cooking moments involved her attempting to make pasta salad. Apparently she did not know to keep the lid off of the pot while the pasta was cooking, which ultimately led to the water boiling over. One of the main reasons this happened was because she did not realize that after the water began to boil she was supposed to turn the burner down to medium, and because there are no “medium” labels on our oven she was completely perplexed as to what number constituted as medium. Fortunately enough Jessica had been on the phone with her mom as well when this started happening. As Jessica was screaming “Oh my gosh what do I do!? What do I do?!” her mom calmly told her to “pour some of the water out of the pot” while Jess continued to freak out.

Needless to say, we overcame our cooking disasters with the help of our mothers, and today I can now proudly say that I can make mean guacamole, an utterly delightful pomodoro sauce and cook non exploding boiled eggs.