This image accurately describes how I feel about cooking:
Nutcracker Garlic
Dozey’s boyfriend, Frank (who is actually Joe’s best friend) is quite the amazing cook. He came over and made some delicious asparagus with garlic the other evening. The next night, I asked him to show me how to use real garlic and put it into pasta. Here is what I learned:
1. Taking the crinkly paper feeling type stuff off of the garlic is quite a long process, I’m impatient dammit!
2. I was just waiting to use the nutcracker thing once the paper stuff was taken off
3. Still waiting
4. He cut some brown shit off of the garlic
5. Apparently these garlic pieces are called cloves?
6. It’s finally time for me to use the nutcracker looking thing (a garlic press?)
7. I am not strong enough to use this nutcracker. I am standing on my tippy toes because somehow I think this will help me.
The moral of the story: There was no point in learning how to use this nutcracker thing because I’m not strong enough therefore I will never get to put garlic in my foods.
om nom nom
Rosemary Roasted Garlic Cats
Grocery store adventures with a partner make the trip much more worth while. Joe decided to pick up some Tailapia while I picked up my usual chicken strips – or as they are officially called “breast tenderloins”.
The meat section surprised me today, everything was so cheap! All this chicken for 3 dollars, it’s going to last me for days. (These are things that you don’t know about when you have been living off of frozen meals for years). We decided to try another one of these Kraft style shake n bakes, Rosemary and Roasted Garlic. The directions say for chicken or fish so we assume we are good to go…
We finish up in the frozen section of the grocery store and we are realizing, why do we buy all of this frozen crap when we could make this same stuff and it would be way better? In this instance, we decided to scoop up some potatoes, my favorite!
In my head, the plan is for “little roasted fried potato jammies”, so I ask my good cookin’ buddy Jackie how to make said product. Apparently roasted means in the oven and fried means in the pan. My b! If you think back to one of my many breakfast potato feeaskos, you know I have attempted this task before. This time, I will leave it to Joe. He has all sorts of plans for garlic, olive oil, and pepper. Psh, who uses any sort of seasoning? Not this gal!
Time to get started!
- Gather supplies for cooking chicken and fish - danger! What are we cooking in? We have to keep these jammies separate. Apparently cookie sheets will work for our task. I am used to calling these things cookie sheets, where as most people call these baking sheets. (Thanks, mom!)
- How long do we cook our products for? The directions say, “BAKE. Until Done.” Really, Kraft, really?! It isn’t until you get inside of the package that it actually tells you how long to bake for. (Bad design, Kraft)
- Time to shake. We need to separate the shake materials so my chicken juice doesn’t get on his fish juice. Here goes the process of emptying out some of the product into another plastic bag – thank the chicken gods nothing bad happened during this process. But make sure to do this over the sink to avoid any potential disaster in your kitchen.
- Now I shall shake my chicken. (I shake my cheese back and forth, I shake my cheese back and forth). The funny part about shake n bake is that it doesn’t actually work. I really am just flipping the chicken strip around inside the bag and then throwing some on top once I have it placed on the cookie sheet.
- “Coat baking pan with cooking spray” – whelp, I don’t own any of this. Aluminum Foil it is! Al-oo-min-e-um. Here we go! The chicken and Tilpaia (how the eff do you spell Tilapia?!) basically look the same, ha.
- When I was in school, I took a Nutrition class where we watched a video about people cooking meat in their houses. It was so gross how people would not wash their hands thoroughly and then wipe them on a towel and the meat juice would basically end up all over their kitchen. So the most important step, is to wash your damn hands! (Cheetah finger nails, optional. Hello Kitty soap, mandatory.)
All while I’m doing this with grimey chicken hands, Dozey is trying to play fetch. What a great helper.
Meanwhile, Joe has been working on the potatoes and doing quite the excellent job. Look at all of this olive oil and garlic! If it were me, I would have put like a teaspoon of olive oil and been too lazy to cut up any garlic. (My eyes are watering already). He seems to think 3 potatoes was enough, but I’m a potato fiend. The best quote was – “I’m going to add some pepper, as long as we don’t catch on fire, we’re doing okay”. Cooking the potatoes this way turns me off because I hate scooting shit around in a pan, I just don’t get it.
Something I did do right during this process is guessing the time on how long each thing would take. Hey, I’m learning something! That is one of my biggest peeves about cooking though, timing the shit and doing all this shit at once. I am damn good at multi tasking, but not when it is something that HAS to be done or your house will blow up. (Irony: after we finished eating, the fire alarm in our building went off – not our fault!)
Rosemary Roasted Garlic Chicken Cats deliciousness!
Cheesey Potato Haircuts
Budget Bytes is a great little site I like to use to aid in my cooking. It’s actually the only one I use. I like it because she breaks things down, uses pictures, and it looks like she has a sweet haircut.
I’ve made these twice baked potatoes a few times before, so you would think this time it would be smooth sailing.
Only after reading the directions do I have a few problems:
1. Sour cream, gross. How about a little milk instead? Joe said they were a little dry the last time when I didn’t use sour cream. But I don’t mind, because my taste buds are boring, remember?
2. 1.25 cups of cheese – there is no .25 on the measuring cup. How am I supposed to know what .25 is? (Oh, elementary school, right.) Joe informs me that it is 1/4 after I had guessed it was 1/2. More cheese, please!
3. The recipe is for 8 “halves” of potato, we only have 6. Fuck it, cheese it up.
Cat Pause (or paws):
4. You are to put the potatoes right onto the oven rack. This scares me. The oven is hot. I don’t want to touch the potatoes with the oven mit either – who knows what has been on that oven mit.
5. Twice baked potatoes. Keyword here, twice. I have to cook these shits, TWICE!? This boggles my mind. The first time around is long enough. An hour, really? Isn’t it okay to eat the potato “raw”? Why do you have to cook it for so long then? Not only that, but then I have to put it BACK into the oven for another 20 minutes? I have to do this after I have mixed in the broccoli and cheese – you know, when the mixture is good and yummy and you just want to eat it.
It felt like when you make cookies or a cake, and you just want to lick the bowl. But you’re not supposed to because apparently you will get sick. I just wanted to eat the potato mixture right then and there! (I totally had a few bites)
While mixing, I totally mixed it onto the counter and onto the floor. CASUALTY CHEESE, RESCUE IT!
To solve the sour creme issue, Joe starts pouring some milk in. I am so nervous that it’s going to be much. Us cats that can’t cook are no good at eyeballing shit.
In the end, they turned out pretty scrumptious and it was plenty of food to last us a few days, which I always like.
Thanks, budget bytes lady, and your sweet haircut.
I Whip My Cheese Back And Forth
Hey all my mexicans and my mexicants!
Apparently it’s cheaper to buy 36 tortillas in a package, so it’s time to put our sombraros on and find ways to use up these tortillas.
F’Chikin Quesadillas it is!
(f’ does not mean fuckin, it means fake)
(it’s also kind of funny if you read this post in a British accent)
Step 1: When saying quesadilla you must pronounce it case-a-dill-a. This is the most important step.
Step 2: Unpack grocries. At this point, Joe shakes some bags of cheese in my face while singing “I whip my cheese back and forth” (this step cannot be skipped, it is imperitive to the well being of your future quesadillas)
Step 3: Cook the fake chikin. Step 1 of Step 3 is to read the directions. Look at the back of this package… the designer here was thinking too far outside the box, they were trying to be too cutesy and it just does not work. I couldn’t find the directions at first because they’re not written in a standard format.
Looking for more delicious dinner ideas? No! I’m looking for how to cook the damn f’chikin.
The first thing my eye goes to is the bottom “Cooking Instructions: Keep frozen until ready to use”, really? The stuff above is in the usual format where you would find recipes, not how to just straight up cook the f’chikin. The part that is even more funny is when you read those 3 “recipes”, you cook the f’chikin the same damn way in each one!
My least favorite thing to do while cooking is when you have to put something in a pan and push it around. My hand eye coordination just doesn’t match up, I don’t know how often to push around or flip or what have you. So now I must recruit Joe.
Step 4: Chop tomato while f’chikin is being pushed around in frying pan. Joe learned a cool new way to dice up a tomato, so I also left that to be his duty.
Step 5: Retrieve giant tupperware container full of lettuce from fridge. Ah, finally a task I can handle.
Step 6: f’chikin is done so it’s time to grab a tortilla and dose-e-do. Horror sets in. The tortillas are too small to fold in half. Putting one on top of each other seems impossible to flip. And it twas, it twas. One side got all burny guy but oh well, noms are noms. Om nom nom.
Step 7: Wrap lettuce around quesadilla. Oh, a lettuce wrap! It tasted like a BLT. To which I said, “we should have put bacos in these!” (but we didnt)
Step 8: Eat giant quesadilla while making smaller flippy in half guys. Those turned out much better (it also helped to turn the heat down on the burner from a 7 to a 3).
Step 9: Yum!
This is how Dozey feels after dinner:
Shake it like a Polaroid Picture
My buddy Jackie keeps suggesting to me that I should “attempt” to make some crazy fancy food in order to see how hilarious it turns out. The problem with that is, I don’t even know where to begin half the time. I’m also really impatient when it comes to food. I want my food and I want it now! (Right now I’m dreaming of breakfast potatoes)
One thing that I do know how to make (thanks, Mom) is Shake n Bake. When I saw the commercial for Kraft’s new product, I was all “Sweet! I can make my chicken more delicious now!” Honestly, half the time I just make it plain because I’m too lazy to even shake n bake. I normally used mashed potatoes as my condiment anyways. People put crab on top of their meat, why can’t I put potatoes on top of my meat?
Back to Kraft. Take a look at this monsterious packaging, the way the design delightfully draws you into its “new” product. It’s going to be delicious, right? Dude. It’s the same damn thing as Shake n Bake. Don’t try and sell me something “new” when it’s clearly not an original idea. Back to those pesky little advertisers and marketers again!
But the truth is, this shit was goddamn delicious. My well cultured friends would probably frown upon the fact that all I did was Shake it like a Polaroid Picture, they would probably want me to do something insane using words that I don’t even understand or knew exsisted. I guess that’s the price you pay for not falling into these advertisers tricks.
Price? This shit was like 3 bucks, ching ching. Ok here is my only problem with Shake n Bake/This New Kraft Shit (that’s the technical name for this product) – the directions on the package for how to cook the chicken is always different from the directions on the actual chicken package. wtf mate?! Why are ya’ll contridicting each other? Those of us that are terrified to be cooking in the first place need consistant directions! Luckily with this one, the temperature was the same, but the time was 10 minutes less. I did it for the lesser of the times, and it actually turned out perfect. (I can’t believe I am saying that)
The other thing I hate about meat is the dethawing process. I hate leaving it out on the counter all day to just soak in the warm kitchen sun, makes me nervous the little chickens are going to get up and walk away. I mean, would you want to be cooked in that hot ass oven? Well, you probably would. Because most of you bitch about the cold winter season and can’t wait to be outside burning to death.
An annoying thing about this particular kind of Shake n Bake was that there were 2 pouches, bread crumbs and cheese. You were suppossed to break the seam down the middle, and then shake them together. Turn it to the left, the cheese falls ontop of the bread crumbs. Turn it to the right, the bread crumbs fall ontop of the cheese. There wasn’t much room for it to fall through the cracks and actually mix correctly. Can I get an idiot proof Shake process next time?!
So there you have it folks, that chicken was done with the cold ass freezer and ready to get a sun tan in the oven. Then I ate it. (My photography skills make my food look far more gross then it actually is to the common person)
Green beans are always my go to side along with my mashed taters. Although I can never make my Green Beans quite like Joe’s mom does, even though I follow her directions! We didn’t have any milk so I couldn’t mash them taters, but I survivded. We got a new “Rice Side” that was Garlic with Cajun Spices – it was also delicious!
All in all, I call this a great success. Dozey enjoyed some chicken and Joe enjoyed some vegetarian riblets that only involve the microwave.
Let the kitty food coma settle in…
Don’t feed TV Dinners to your cat, or to yourself…
TV Dinners are such devious little bastards. Since you can’t blame an inanimate object for something, as much as I would like to, I’m going to have to find a person to blame.
Photographers and Marketers. Sorry guys and gals, but you are to blame. Where do you come up with these photos for the cover of TV Dinners? I swear you walk into some 5 star restaurant, snap some pictures, and paste them onto the cardboard box that this space food is contained in. When your food comes in a cardboard box, I think that is the first sign that you shouldn’t eat it.
But I fall for these scams every so often. Never go to the grocery store hungry, or you’ll come home with a bunch of shitty TV Dinners. I don’t know why I am so surprised every time it comes out of the microwave. What? I thought that the microwave zapped it into the beautiful goodness that it looks like on the box. I’m not sure what is more scary – the TV Dinner frozen or after it’s been microwaved. They should have a contest – whose TV Dinner looks the closest to the picture on the box? Or better yet, whose TV Dinner looks the most opposite then the picture on the box?
On this day, I bought the TV Dinner made by Banquet because I was told there would be lots of coupons inside. Why did I think that the coupons would be for various other things in the store and not JUST Banquet products? How dare I think-outside-the-brand. (I should TM that)
Growing up, I ate a lot of TV Dinners because when you’re a kid, eating disgusting food is great. My BFF Tisha (mentioned in my first post!) had this nack for not following the directions. Which she is damn right in that notion because the directions are a pain in my freakin ass…
“Remove the film cover off of the chicken nuggets, but not off of the mac n cheese, and poke holes in the film cover above the brownie. Replace film cover for the last minute of microwave zapping and don’t forget to double tap”
Like, WHAT?! With that being said, I still couldn’t ignore the directions (insert psychological diagnoses of why I couldn’t do that here).
The directions on this particular TV Dinner really did say what I said above, minus the double tap. It also said to “move the chicken nuggets around”… move them around?! Do you mean, flip them? Who writes these things anyways! In art school we always did this task where one person writes down a set of directions while the other person follows them word for word. There is a reason you learn this task before moving on to a real mans job. So you don’t confuse idiots like me! Oh, and so you can be credible and make sense and be a real goddamn human being adult idiot child face head (TM).
Who knew you could go on this long about TV Dinners?
The pudding always ends up with corn in it. The brownie always tastes like the mac n cheese. The mac n cheese is always half frozen. The chicken nuggets are probably made of soy. “My child will never be a vegetarian” – good luck with that, pretty sure you’re feeding them soy 9 times out of 10.
Who are these things packaged by anyways? I bet the Marketers do all the work, even make the food, thats why it’s so shitty.
(this all coming from a gal who works around many Marketers, Photographers, and Photoshop-extraordinares)
Do not feed your cats, kids, or yourself TV Dinners folks. If you do, make sure you exercise it out, like so:
