I’m just going to come right out and say it: I’m a pretty lousy cook. The problem is, I think I’m a pretty good cook. That is, until I actually have to eat what I’ve cooked, and then I’m like, “This kind of tastes like particle board.” But I’m not a particularly picky person. So the fact that it doesn’t taste good isn’t as distressing as the fact that no matter what I cook (“meals in fifteen minutes!” “easy-bake!” “one-pot recipes!”) it takes about 3 hours and the kitchen is completely destroyed afterward. I think the passage about Kyle in For the Love of God is actually about me, and cooking. (Click to enlarge)

And yet I persist. I read hipster mom blogs where they pack their kids organic lunches in cute bento boxes and whip up three-course meals reeking of haute french cuisine. And I say to myself, “I can do that.”

There are just some times when no good comes of self-confidence. And almost all of those times happen in the kitchen for me.

Last week I found a recipe for 21st Century Mac and Cheese. Knowing how f-ing good 20th century mac and cheese is, I figured a century’s worth of improvement has pretty much got to put it on par with manna (although, I just looked that up to make sure it was what I thought it was, and my dictionary said it was “the substance miraculously supplied as food to the Israelites in the wilderness” – ahem. “Substance” doesn’t sound all that delicious, now, does it? That sounds like something I would make for those poor Israelites. And the third definition was “a sweet secretion from the manna ash used as a mild laxative,” which might sound delicious, but nobody really eats laxatives for pleasure (do they???). Maybe I mean something else… ambrosia? First def: “something very pleasing to taste or smell” – okay, sort of – second def: “a fungal product used as food by ambrosia beetles”. Oh boy. My simile is getting out of hand. I hope you all know what I mean…)

Anyway – Alden has also recently been introduced to macaroni and talks about it a lot, so I thought I would make some for her. I have come to realize that my cooking shortcomings as far as taste is concerned usually come from not following the recipe (go figure). My no-nonsense grandmother used to say, “Anyone who can read can cook.” Well, I can read, I’m just not so good at following directions. Plus, there’s always the problem of not having any of the right ingredients on hand, and just substituting things I do have (milk and yogurt and maybe an egg or something for mayonnaise, cottage cheese for cheddar, you know, really really bad substitutions like that). So this time I said I was going to do it right. I would exactly follow the directions, and then it would be delicious. I went shopping for “sweet Hungarian paprika” and ran into problem number 1: the only kind of paprika to be found in Chestertown is regular plain old McCormick paprika. I got the kind in the fancy-looking jar, though, just to be sure. Also, the recipe calls for penne, but dammit, I wanted to make mac and cheese, not penne and cheese.

Oh, and “3/4 medium onion”? What is that? Can you really overdo onion? What am I going to do with the remaining 1/4 onion? Sheesh. So I put the whole thing in. Actually, I put two in, because the recipe said “serves 4 and doubles easily” and most times when things say “serves 4” they mean “serves one Matthew and a half Robbi”. So I “easily” doubled it.

Oh, and forget the hot red pepper flakes. I can’t eat that spicy shit.

Well, they weren’t kidding when they said “serves 4”. And yes, you can overdo onion. And, hm, maybe that spicy shit was what gave the mac and cheese that thing they call flavor. So, yet again, the kitchen was a disaster area, I was sweating from 2 hours of hard labor, Matthew once again gamely said that “it just needs some salt,” and we got the added bonus of the smell of onions permeating everything in the house.

So please, if you’re in the area, stop by and take some of this god-awful stuff off of our hands. We’re soldiering through it slowly, but those four servings they talked about in the recipe must have been Man vs. Food servings.

The one good thing to come of it is Alden has shut up about wanting mac and cheese all the time.