Cooking for one

There is nothing inherently interesting about my dinner (pictured above) except that it took me about two weeks to make it. A few weeks ago, I was down to nothing in the fridge but a jar of peanut butter and some ketchup. Inspired, I set off for Trader Joe's. (If any Trader Joe's executives are reading this, I'd like to point out that I have mentioned your fine establishment twice in as many posts. Perhaps it's time to talk sponsorship?) "I'm going to make tacos!" I thought to myself. "And I will also make this tasty pepper and tomato dish whose name I cannot pronounce!" The problem is, when you're cooking for one, and you make tacos, that really means you'll be eating tacos for the next week and a half. So I got all the taco ingredients, and only the non-perishable components of the pepper dish, knowing it would be at least a week before I could reasonably be expected to be able to eat anything that doesn't go on a tortilla. 

Tacos consumed, I was ready to move on to the pepper dish. The recipe is in one of those fancy-pants cookbooks with pretty pictures and each dish having a list of ingredients six inches long, half of which I have never heard of, much less keep stocked in my kitchen. Maybe you, Valued Reader, keep muscovado sugar and orange-flower water in your pantry. I do not. Still, I improvise and it always turns out fine. So yesterday I decided it was finally time. I stopped off at Trader Joe's (Hello?) on my way to a beach outing to pick up something for lunch and while I was there I grabbed some tomatoes, which I remembered I still needed for this recipe. On my way home from the beach I decided what would go really well with the dish would be a sourdough baguette. Stopped back at my neighborhood TJ's to collect that. Got home, got out the pan, reached for some olive oil and nearly screamed and threw the cookbook across the room in disbelief and frustration. There was about a teaspoon of olive oil left in the bottle. And I had no other oil to speak of. And you can't saute an onion and peppers without oil. At that point there was no way I was making a third trip to the store, so I heated up some leftover lasagna and called it a day. 

This project had dragged on so long all I wanted was to just cook the damn peppers and be done with it. So, even though I don't particularly enjoy making anything that requires much preparation on a weeknight, tonight it finally came together. Although I did end up having to MacGyver the recipe a little bit and add some barbecue sauce because it needed a little something more. I'm sure the creator of the recipe would recoil in horror if he knew something so pedestrian went into it. But the truth is, there are very few things that don't benefit from the addition of a little barbecue sauce.