Hey Good Lookin'! Whatcha Got Cookin'?

Those of you who know me well know I don't really like to cook. Or bake. Really. At all. In my ideal reality, I'm a super chef. But put that ideal reality into practice, and well, it's not pretty. It's not that I can't cook or bake. With the exception of a few minor hiccops, I'm pretty decent in the kitchen. I just don't like all that is involved: meal planning, ingredient shopping, prep time, bake time. Blech. Too much trouble for something that is going to be obsolete in 30 minutes.

So, imagine my surprise when I got the urge to bake a chocolate cake from scratch this week! I had my "we must save more money" panties on and decided that we needed to use more of the food spilling out of our pantry. Typically, when I get this urge and start foraging through the kitchen I quickly discover I can't make one single meal/snack/crumb with what I have on hand. I give up and get over it. But not this time. This time, I had all the ingredients for a chocolate cake. And I went for it. And the cake is FABULOUS! The peeps helped me out, which renders the cake inedible for consumption by anyone outside of our four-person family, namely for sanitary reasons, but that's the beauty of family, right?

Still floating from my 100%-from-scratch trophy cake, I attempted a second recipe using only ingredients that we had on hand: Chicken and Biscuits using a recipe from a Jiffy cookbook I ordered years ago in one of my "I should really cook more often" phases. Instead of buying the Jiffy biscuit mix as suggested, I whipped up a cheesy biscuit batter, tossed in some home-grown carrots and corn, mixed it with some grilled chicken and cream of mushroom soup, and wah-lah: Dinner Is Served! Pretty tasty, too. By the way, yes, I have a small backyard garden, which might seem strange since I don't like to cook, but growing your own stuff rocks! We're waiting on the cantaloupes to ripen.

The boiling water image? My town is currently under a boil order so it doesn't matter that I don't like to cook. I'm stuck. Unless I go to the store and buy bottled water. But from my perspective, boiling water is the lesser of two evils.