Cooking for One, Part Three

If this week has taught me anything, it's that I am a terrible cook, I have no business in the kitchen, and I need to stop pretending that I do. I can't even roast a goddamned chicken. From here on out, I am only going to eat pre-prepared meals. It will probably knock ten years off my life, what with all the sodium and fat and processed this-and-that, but I figure with all the time I'll save by not cooking and not washing five thousand dishes every day, it will all balance out. 

I'm on day three of eating soggy, disgusting cauliflower, dry bean casserole, and rubbery chicken. On Sunday I was feeling all ambitious and decided to cook some dishes from some recipes I had been meaning to try. I think the first problem was that these recipes were all "healthy." If I had set out to make some sort of delicious carb-laden lasagna or fatty quiche, it probably wouldn't have ended in disaster. 

I ended up with about eight cups of extra broth for the beans (that the recipe now encourages me to turn into soup. Will the burden never end??), they took twice as long to cook as they were supposed to, and came out tasting like Thanksgiving (probably due to the sage), but not in a good way. Maybe if it were November, it would have been alright, but I don't want Thanksgiving in July. The cauliflower took three times as long to cook as it should have, and even though I absolutely roasted the pants off of it, it still came out soggy and undewhelming. I probably didn't use the right pan, or the right amount of oil, or whatever. And the chicken, well, let's just say this is probably the last time I will ever roast a whole chicken. I found that if I dump a bottle of barbecue sauce on each serving, it is palatable, so that will get me through the week and the Matterhorn of chicken meat I was left with, but it's just not worth the mess and effort. 

My entire Sunday afternoon and evening was monopolized by this folly. There were shallots to peel, cauliflower to chop, beans to soak, and it all amounted to a disgusting, soggy, bland culinary disaster that I will be suffering through for the rest of the week until it is all gone and I can stock my freezer with nothing but cheese enchiladas. And it took me two more days just to wash all the pots, pans, utensils and other implements necessary for such an endeavor. Just give me a microwave and a toaster oven. I'll be fine.