Hope: Supper Time

After deciding I should probably do something during the day besides watch How I Met Your Mother (which is awesome) and read, I've actually started cooking a lot. First on Saturday my dad and I made pecan pies. We froze one and ate the other (yummy!). Then yesterday I decided to have a dinner party. I wanted to be legit and have an appetizer, main meal, and dessert. The dessert was done, since I still had the frozen pecan pie, but I had to figure out the others and they had to be vegetarian. Thus I decided to make spinach dip and macaroni and cheese casserole. This was about 4 o'clock. By the time I finished cleaning my room (a prereq for people to come over), getting the spinach dip recipe from my great aunt, and going to the grocery store, it was 6. I had felt kind of pathetic at the grocery store, trying to figure out how many onions will turn into one cup when chopped up (fyi, if you get a really big one it makes 2) and mistaking a bell pepper for a tomato. But when I got home, it was worse. First I didn't even know how to chop an onion, then I mistook the cheese-cutter thing for the tomato peeler. It was soon apparent that there was zero chance that dinner would be ready by 7:30. Fortunately my dad helped, as did Sumi when she came at 7, bringing garlic bread and green beans, and somehow all the food got cooked, even if Timmy and Pranav did have to wait a while. It even tasted good.

So lessons learned (besides how to chop and peel vegetables): cooking takes a long time, and you can modify recipes if you don't like the ingredients. For example, the spinach dip called for three tomatoes and half a cup of olives. I don't like either, but put them in anyway, but in the end the dip would have been fine without them.

Then tonight I cooked dinner for my parents. I made stuffed chayote squash and served it with corn on the cob and pears. I put my vegetable chopping skills from last night to use and cut the onions down, since my dad doesn't like them. Compared to the spinach dip, they were pretty easy to make, though that might have been only because I had more time. I learned how to steam vegetables, use the pressure cooker, and cook chicken, which is really gross-feeling when it's raw. Everything turned out well, though I wished I put more cheese in the squash to make up for the lack of onions. I also liked pears, especially when my mom heated them up. Yeah, I'd never had fresh pear before. Sad. But anyway I feel like I'm getting better at this whole cooking thing and might not starve this summer in Athens, so that's always a plus.