May 26th, 2009

Anyone who knows me knows I can’t cook. Never really tried. Didn’t get the gene.

But after enjoying a delicious meal at the home of Kim and Bryan, the bloggers I met last weekend, I decided I might like to try my hand at it. You see, Kim made homemade manicotti, including making the pasta shells from scratch!

I thought it would make a nice birthday dinner for my husband, Dave, and so I slaved away in the kitchen making my own pasta. You do it by pouring a thin mixture of eggs, flour, water and oil in a saute pan and swirling it around like you would a crepe. When the top dries, you simply pop it out on a plate and instant pasta!

I made 15 of those beauties and confidently went on to make the cheese filling and meatballs. Didn’t they turn out nice? Thanks for the recipe, Kim!

I basked in the glow of knowing that if I apply myself, I can pull off a decent meal and no one even has to go to the emergency room to get their stomach pumped.

And then God said "Get over yourself. It was a fluke."

The very next day I made a grilled cheese sandwich in the brand new saute pan I’d bought to make the pasta in, but didn’t wind up using.

When the pan heated, I started smelling something. I chastised my husband for not cleaning some burned food off the stovetop.

But the smell wasn’t exactly burnt food. Oh, no.

It was the smell of stupid.

We had a good chuckle over it, took this picture for proof a moron lives here and I ate my grilled cheese sandwich.

The very next day I was making an omelette in the very same pan.

Hmmmm. What’s that smell?

That’d be the smell of short term memory loss.

You’ll be happy to know I finally took the paper off the bottom of the pan and my house doesn’t smell like burning barcode anymore.

Is this universe’s way of telling me to get the hell out of the kitchen and leave it to the experts?