A Recipe for the Rest of Us

Breaking news- Endless Simmer most resourceful site on the web!

I’m not quite sure why I love this blog so much. I’m a horrible cook. Horrible isn’t even the right way to describe it. It’s more like bad cooking karma. I look at a piece of toast and it burns itself. Steaks on the grill mysteriously become well-done and chewy in my presence. But, being a huge fan of food, I visit ES to read about BS and gansie’s cooking adventures and look at 80 Proof’s pretty pics, and whenever I’m invited to eat someone else’s cooking, I’m the first one to show up with fork in hand and bib tucked in.

So my friend Marcy is hosting a dinner party, sends me the menu and it looks phenomenal. Yellow pepper and white bean soup. Eggplant Manicotti. I call Marcy and ask if I can bring a couple of friends (an hour before- a serious food party faux pas) and she says she may not have enough food for everyone. I then proceed to blurt out, without thinking, a series of words that I have never, ever, put in the same sentence: “I can make a dish!” She says great, see you in an hour. Oops.

What did I just get myself into? Heart palpitations, pacing around the kitchen, general freaking out ensues. I am a culinary catastrophe waiting to happen, and I just offered to make something?? So I go on Endless Simmer, come across El’s guacamole recipe and decide what the hell, I’ll give it a go.

So I present to you a different kind of recipe. A recipe for survival in the kitchen for one who can’t cook to save her life, and if she ever did, she’d die anyway because she would burn the house down.

Drunken Guac

1. Make a drink.
2. Attempt to mash up 4 incredibly-unripe avocados and curse untrained culinary eye for not spotting good ones (they all look the same to me!)
3. Call roommate and cry.
4. After roommate agrees to bring ripened avocados, make another drink.
5. Combine onion, cilantro, sea salt, garlic, tomato, lime juice and peppers in a bowl.
6. Fish out garlic wedges after realizing one must chop them up before adding to mix
7. Decide a strong third drink is required.
8. Upon seeing roommate enter kitchen with ripened avocados in hand, hug for an awkwardly long duration of time and promise to name first-born child after him.
9. Mash ripened avocados and add.
10. Pass out.

Thank you Eleanor and ES for making my first kitchen experience a success. Shockingly, people ate the guac and didn’t spontaneously vomit. I however, will surely throw up if I’m put in this culinary situation ever again.

Moving on, I’m hosting a clothing swap next Wednesday and am thinking I’ll make mini-sandwiches. Those can’t go wrong, right? Can they? Oh shit, can they?! Oh god. Recipe suggestions for mini-sandwiches are requested.