Tasty

I love food. Eating it, cooking it, baking it, these are things I like to do. I'd say I generally make dinner at least 4 nights a week. It makes me happy, especially when I can feed other people. I wasn't always such a good cook though. When I was younger, in my teenage years, my mother was constantly trying to get me to learn how to cook. She told me that it was a useful skill, as she wouldn't be moving to college with me and I would eventually have to learn how to feed myself. I'm pretty sure that she also wanted me to learn so that she wouldn't be the only one making dinner for us every night. For years, I fiercely resisted. My parents would go away for the weekend, and I would find myself living on peanut butter crackers, grilled cheese sandwiches, and pizza delivery. This wasn't so bad, but it wasn't exactly gourmet either. So one day, I decided to give in and make my family dinner. I chose mac and cheese for my efforts, not the Kraft kind, but the real kind. Having gotten all of the ingredients together, I shooed my mother, who was trying to help me, out of the kitchen. Didn't matter that I could barely boil water, I was going to do this on my own. So I putzed around the kitchen, mixing cheeses and milk and whatever else went into the recipe, dumped the whole thing in a big baking dish, and sat down to wait for my noodle and dairy masterpiece to come out of the oven. A little while later, having made a salad, and set the table, I pulled it out of the oven, and my family and I sat down to eat. I was loving all the praise coming my way, as everyone was thanking me for making dinner. That is, until they actually took a bite of it. It was weirdly crunchy. Trying to figure out what I had done wrong, my mother started going over the recipe with me, asking had I done this or that, and the answer was yes every time, until she got to the part about boiling the macaroni before putting them in the dish with everything else. See, I had followed the directions exactly, but apparently this was one of those advanced mac & cheese recipes, where they assume that you know to soften the noodles. In my uneducated mind, I had assumed that this would happen naturally when they were in the oven. Instead, it just served to make them a little toasty around the edges. It wasn't completely inedible, but it wasn't exactly what I'd call good either. However, to my family's credit, after they had finished laughing, they did eat it. They even said it was good, probably to encourage more helpful, dinner-making behavior on my part (with ample supervision next time). After that, I did started cooking more, and I think I've gotten rather good at it. But to this day, I haven't attempted to make mac & cheese again that isn't of the Kraft variety. However, when my mom came to visit me over the Memorial Day, I did cook a number of dinners for her, and even sent her home with recipes. Hopefully, this went a little way to help make up for the fact that my first dinner attempt could probably have chipped a few teeth.