The Art of Microwaving

I have no talents in the kitchen and I never intend to develop them. My tastes are simple and best equated to a 5 year old. I like noodles with butter and any cereal that doesn't start with Kashi. I think water is boring and vegetables are gross. I hate grocery shopping because its cold everywhere and I'm always afraid that I'm going to knock something over with those stupid squeaky carts. The few times I have tried cooking since living on my own have been nothing short of disastrous. I blew a baked macaroni and cheese recipe because I confused the "T" and "t" of tablespoon and teaspoon which is an issue when referring to mustard allocation. I should have doubted the sanity of a mac n' cheese recipe calling for mustard but who am I to question a website charading as foodnetwork.com? Those creative bitches on Pinterest make it seem easy to make a S'mores casserole. Here's a warning...marshmallow fluff has a 2 minute burn time in the broiler. Pasta Carbonara? People joke about it being the "breakfast pasta"...mine was scrambled eggs with some angel hair mixed in. But of all my cooking failures lasagna...lasagna was my piéce de résistance.

Not only is lasagna a hard word to sound out and spell phonetically it's also a real doozy to make. With out a doubt the worst part about lasagna is the noodles. First of all its impossible to strain them with out ruining their weird flat/wavy (flavy) form. And then when you try to pick them up they're slippery and disgusting but also burning-lava-hot. To be fair my mom told me to get the noodles that you don't have to boil...but I couldn't "find" them.  The second worst part about lasagna is making the meat sauce. there is nothing more gross-dacious than raw ground beef. I'm no vegetarian but I like to pretend my animal products grow on trees and are born fully cooked. Again a problem easily avoided by purchasing pre-meated sauce but I can only last 5 minutes in a grocery store before succumbing to grocery-psychosis...a condition where one thinks one is a gourmet chef for brief intervals and for the longer intervals buys every kind of battery "just in case."I even managed to ruin the only good part of my lasagna experience. I L-O-V-E cheese so every time I got stressed out by the lava noodles or the nuances of cooking ground beef in a tiny skillet I would pick at the package of shredded mozzarella...which meant I ran out of cheese. And as all cheese enthusiasts know ricotta is no substitute for the mozz. After 3 attempts at covering the pan with tinfoil I gave up, shoved my wavy noodle mess into the oven and set the timer (by timer I of course mean...started an episode of Mythbusters because the cook time on lasagna is conveniently equal to the length of the episode where they try to prove that you can slingshot a human being across the American/Canadian border). Roughly 46 minutes had passed, the myth had been busted (bummer) and I couldn't wait to dig into my lasagna. Unfortunately the oven was not on. In a stressful moment when the noodles had been boiling over I forgot to hit the bake button which meant the oven had been in a holding pattern. I cursed my lasagna wishing upon it an unfulfilled life with no lasagna babies and told my oven it was grounded and only to be used for break and bake cookies for the rest of its life.

What have I learned from these experiences...cooking is exhausting and everything I like can be made in under 6 minutes with a microwave, toaster, or a cell phone.

Things you can make in a microwave:

1. Oatmeal

2. Easy Mac

3. Lean Cuisines/Hot Pockets

4. Popcorn and M&Ms

5. Bagel Bites

Things you can make in the toaster:

1. Bagels

2. English Muffins

3. Toast

4. Pop Tarts

5. Eggo Waffles

Things you can make with a cell phone:

1. Papa Johns

2. Dominos

3. Jimmy Johns

4. Chinese Take Out

5. Anything you can force your friends to go get for you

To err is human, to forgive, divine. To microwave, genius.

-Alexander Pope