five-star cooking, right?

so apparently not cooking for almost a month can really affect one's cooking skills. or at least mine, anyway. last night, my beau had a few errands to run right around dinnertime, and even though i promised him i wouldn't cook and he could cook for me when he got home, he took too long, i got hungry and in turn, started cooking. simple enough task . . . saute the chicken, steam the broccoli, boil the pasta and make a quick cheesy lemon garlic sauce to pour over the broccoli and pasta. easy enough, right? **apparently not.**

first of all, i admit that whenever i cook, i have a timing issue. i typically don't consider that something like chicken takes a lot longer to cook than, say, broccoli. and so i start the broccoli at the same time i start the chicken and my broccoli ends up being ready quite a few minutes before the chicken and is only lukewarm by the time we actually eat. it's something i've been trying to work on, but **i'm completely scatterbrained most of the time** and i forget and make timing mistakes all the time.

well last night, it was a little different. my beau had already seasoned the meat and cut the broccoli before he left for his errands. when i got hungry, i went into the kitchen and started getting things in pans and whatnot, at the same time talking with my roommate about schizophrenics (she's a social work major AND we were watching true crime). **apparently this was all too much for my brain to handle,** and after putting the vegetable steamer in the pot and the broccoli in that, i just turned the stove on and threw the pot on the burner. without water in the pot. and let it "steam" that way for prolly close to ten minutes before i noticed a bad odor and remembered what i had done. i quickly pulled the pot off the stove, put water in it and put it back on there. needless to say, the broccoli had a slightly-burned-tasting-a-lot-like-metal flavor to it that we both had to drown out with tons of that sauce i was telling you about.

and about that sauce. see what had happened was . . . to start the sauce, you have to melt 2 tablespoons of butter in a pan. so i turned the burner on, on high of course cuz i wanted to get the pan hot really quick, and threw the butter in. and then i forgot that butter burns very easily if it's too hot. and so my butter burned. all this was going on when my broccoli was supposedly steaming (pre-water in the pot) so you can **just imagine the sweet smell of burned butter and heated metal** wafting through my kitchen. it was at this point that my back was turned to the stove and i didn't even realize anything was burning when my roommate asked me what the smell was. and that's when it dawned on me that my butter was scalding and the broccoli had no water in it. of course i couldn't wholely smell the burning cuz the chicken was already sauteeing at this time and it did smell good.

as all of this is going on, my chicken is cooking and the noodles are boiling. by now i've thrown out the burned butter and started over with the sauce. everything seems to be going well. and then the chicken gets done, the sauce thickens, the pasta softens . . . and the broccoli still isn't cooked. remember what i said about timing? this time it was backwards, though. had i put water in the pot originally, i'm inclined to say that **everything would've prolly turned out done at about the same time.** but this time, because the broccoli took so long, the noodles were a bit cold and the sauce was just a bit too thick. the chicken was still okay, but the onions i threw in with it were now pretty much caramelized.

the broccoli finally finishes steaming -- or is as steamed as i was going to let it get cuz i was tired of waiting for it to become completely done. it was a bit crunchy, but nothing that was unedible. i mean, people eat raw broccoli all the time anyway, right? right. i make up two plates, one for me and the other for my beau, and we settle in to eat. and all i can taste when i eat the broccoli is burned metal. and since i didn't scrub the burned butter out of the bottom of the pan, the sauce tastes a bit like that, which adds to the burned flavor of the broccoli and kind of ruins the pasta. the noodles are lukewarm and the **sauce has the texture of oatmeal** at this point. i admit it: not my best meal.

and then my beau takes a bite of everything, and tells me how **great it all tastes.** and then i remember why i keep him around . . . no matter how bad my cooking is, or how horrible of a mood i'm in, or how irritated i get so quickly, he is always there to tell me how great my cooking is, how amazing i am, how he's lucky to have me in his life.

**and that always makes me feel better.**