Wednesday was the cooking fiasco. Not really fiasco, but definitely eventful.
Me and Sean. Sean and me. When the two of us live together, it will definitely be interesting. Unfortunately, neither of us have had much cooking experience and usually stick to eating sandwiches and frozen foods. So we decided we needed to mix it up a bit, but without going out to eat every single night.
While at the grocery store a couple days before, we'd bought some kind of lemon-herb marinated boneless skinless chicken breast, which in itself was a bit confusing. (At the store we were looking for the cheapest chicken breast we could find, and it all seemed scattered around. Sean frustratingly asked why there wasn't a sign for "Cheap Chicken," which I thought was a very relevant question, no matter how silly it sounded.) But we found the pre-marinated version which also happened to be the cheapest, so that settled that. Add in some rotini, Alfredo sauce and broccoli and we had somewhat of a plan.
So. Wednesday we cooked. We pulled out the brand spanking new stainless steel pot and pan bought specifically for the occasion, lit the gas stove, boiled water in the pot for the noodles, poured some olive oil in the pan and plopped in the chicken. Within less than a minute the bottoms were seared to the metal and the smoke detector was blaring. Freaking out, we pushed open the tiny window and grabbed paper bags to circulate the air. The alarm stopped and I attempted to save the chicken. Fearing it would get burnt beyond edibility, I continuously flipped the chicken on one burner while stirring the noodles on another.
The smoke alarm went off again. So back to waving paper bags around like idiots.
Eventually, the chicken looked like chicken and the noodles looked like noodles. So we put it all together with the Alfredo sauce and ate, quite content with what we conjured. Even the slightly burned parts weren't so bad!
Afterwards I started cleaning the pan. But the residue from the chicken would not come off no matter how hard I scrubbed and how long I let it soak.
So to the internet it was! After finding several methods to remove stubborn stains on stainless steel, we decided on the cheapest and easiest which required combining baking soda and water into a paste. Which of course prompted a visit to the drugstore down the street to buy said baking soda.
Half an hour later I was in the kitchen dumping half of the baking soda into a cup of water to create something that resembled a paste. I then dumped that into the pan and let it sit.
And it worked! It was a relief to know I didn't ruin Sean's only pan on the very first use.
Feeling rather proud of ourselves for making our first home-cooked meal successfully and for figuring out how to fix the stubborn residue problem all on our own, we then realized we'd completely forgotten about including the broccoli!
So a couple days later we used the trusty internet yet again to learn how to steam broccoli (no, neither of us had cooked broccoli before.) Obviously it was very easy. So we cooked the rest of the noodles, threw on the rest of the Alfredo sauce, stirred in the broccoli and leftover chicken and tada! Another home-cooked meal! A very tasty home-cooked meal, might I add. I was rather proud of ourselves for making something without using a recipe, no matter how sarcastic all of this might be sounding...
More to come...
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