Kitchen Hijinx

In an attempt to impress my honey with my fabulous cooking abilities, I did a practice dinner tonight. I made cauliflower soup from scratch with some dirty rice, (yes the rice came out of a box) and chicken breasts sautéed with onions garlic olive oil and sage. Sounds fancy right? I went to the Food Network website and pilfered some recipes first. I spent a total of two hours in the kitchen, and by the end of it all I was covered in steaming cauliflower chunks; as was the wall, coffee maker and pretty much everything within shooting distance of my blender.

Things started off well, I managed to utilize three gas burners at once and nothing was burned. The breasts were huge and I deglazed them like four times and put them in the oven to finish off, because I saw people do that in Hell’s Kitchen. The rice was just simmering and I managed not to burn it. It doesn’t seem like a hard thing to do you know, cooking rice, but I have turned my kitchen black with burning rice smoke on many an occasion. I just forget about it! Who wants to sit there and watch rice cooking anyway?

I suspected the chicken would be the worst mostly because I don’t have any idea what to do with it, but it turned out to be the best part. I used two big bags of chopped cauliflower and let them simmer with the onions oil and shit ton of garlic I put in. Once everything was soft and “floating apart” or whatever I knew it was time for the blender. Now I seemed to remember something about a warning and not putting hot ingredients in the blender? But whatever, I was hungry! I had been smelling this fabulous stuff cooking for an hour.

I guess I put one too many cauliflower heads in the blender. I thought I put the lid on but something came up and singed my hand, so I pulled back. The top of the blender went flying off once I was no longer holding the lid and Voila! Instant cauliflower shower. Despite my set back and the fact that half the soup ended up my person, it was actually pretty good, if a bit chunky. I was just afraid to try the blender again so it didn’t get nice and frothy smooth like it does when my MAN makes it! I thought I should record this moment for posterity. I ended up with a very large and well-rounded meal. The only bad thing was that I didn’t have anyone to share it with!