Cooking Jackass

Today I had an adventure in meal planning. This is my first time living alone without the safety nets of a college campus, so it's also the first time I've really had to feed myself. I was blessed with a dad and a stepmom who genuinely love to cook, and shared that love with their children. Unfortunately, I was not blessed with the patience that is an integral part of how they create such wonderful things in the kitchen, and I haven't spent as much time cooking with them as maybe I should have. This lead to the interesting conundrum of me knowing what making stir fry should look like and not really knowing how to replicate it.

My first step was to locate everything I needed to make the food. Not going to lie, this step felt more like stalling. Then I got into the chopping. Watching my dad chop something in the kitchen is truly something to behold. He's gotten to the point you see on cooking shows where they cut things so fast you're sure they're going to lose a finger, even though they somehow never do. My clumsy desecration of a few heads of broccoli did not hold a candle to this spectacle. It didn't occur to me before how much thought would go into something like that. I didn't really want to break up the little clumps that looked like trees, because those are adorable, but some of them seemed too big. When I tried to cut them, though, the little seed things went everywhere, so the redwood brocollies got to stay redwood brocollies. The chicken was slightly less unwieldy to turn into strips and then cubes, but I somehow got it to make this weird ripping sound a few times, and that just felt uncomfortable and wrong. Still, I felt like things were going better once everything was seasoned and in the pan.

I ruined that feeling by playing an old favorite game, How Many Ways Can One Person Fuck Up Rice? The classic Alyssa move is to forget that there is a specific ratio of how much water should go with how much rice. This time, I was determined not to make this mistake, and I read the box like a goddamned champion. The exceptionally complicated ratio I've never been able to remember, you ask? 1:1. I managed to make a new first mistake instead, by putting all the rice and water in the pot together instead of bringing the water to a boil first. My second mistake was not setting a timer when I figured the first mistake would mess up the timing anyway, and my final mistake was forgetting about the rice. At some point, I got overwhelmed with trying to figure out how to tell if the chicken was cooked. I didn't want Sal to be my first ever dinner guest. I settled on cleaving a couple of test pieces in half and letting them stand for their brethren. When that was taken care of, I took the lid off the rice I assumed would be done and was greeted with a faint smell of char. Luckily, the majority of the rice was salvageable and it didn't stick badly to the pot.

Surprisingly in the face of all these obstacles and missteps, I ended up with a pretty tasty result. It's definitely one of the better meals I've ever made. The chicken was well-seasoned, and the broccoli was cooked to that nice place where the flavor has been brought out, but it's still got some crunch. I made enough to feed myself with this week, I think. If I ever get tired of blogging, I could start a YouTube channel for terrible cooks who are on their own for the first time. I think that would be a relatable hit.