Cooking With Nilla

Now I have to say I'm not a terrible cook. And by cook, I mean the kind of person who follows a written recipe, not a "chef" who is able to make it up as they go along. I enjoy cooking. I enjoy trying new things (both in making them and eating them). Hence Monday Meals. Which we didn't have today, since Lea and Morgan flew to Arizona to get her all oriented and registered for her Freshman year of college. (Sometimes it's weird to me that many of my friends have teenage children... But then I remember that I also have friends who have grown children, and it doesn't seem so strange anymore ;)). Anyway... So yeah, for the most part, I can follow a recipe and have it turn out at least close to what it should be like. Yeah, my roll-cake cracked. Yeah, my barley pilaf was a bit firmer than it should have been (and a few of the barley pieces got a little burned from the browning portion of the instructions). But all in all, my stuff comes out edible and rather tasty.

But sometimes I still have my adventures.

Like tonight. Tonight I thought I'd throw a dinner together. I try to always use a recipe, because there is comfort in that for me. Especially the "tried and true" ones on allrecipes.com. But sometimes we don't have all the ingredients. And sometimes I don't feel like stopping at the store. And today was one of those sometimes. So I decided to wing it and do my best at creating a white chicken chili with what we already had in the pantry.

Frozen chicken breast tenders.... check!
chicken broth... check! (only I didn't use it and opted instead for the chicken water resulting from boiling the chicken)
lots of various seasonings... check!
2 cans of cannelloni beans... check! (stocked up on beans when they were 50 cents a couple weeks ago)
green onions... check! (once I pulled out the ones that were still good, at least :)).

So I did my thing. And wound up with something that much more resembled chicken and bean soup than white chicken chili. In fact, the first time I tasted it, it tasted like chicken floating in slightly chicken-flavored water. It made me think of this. That show seriously cracks me up. Anyway... I added more seasonings, and let it just simmer and cook down. And actually, by the time we added peas (which was a last-minute decision when I didn't realize it would reduce down to something resembling a chili, which I could have added sour cream to) and then it reduced down quite a bit, it was actually more flavorful, and perhaps a tad too salty -- but not unbearably so. Anyway, it was edible. And my mom even said it was "pretty good." Eh... I wouldn't write it up for future use or try to re-invent it for Monday Meals at some future date. But it was food. And it used what we had rather than me stopping at the store for ingredients.

So that was my brief foray into cooking sans recipe. I probably won't venture there often. My taste buds expect deliciousness, not "eh."

Last week, I followed a recipe though. It was for a Dumb Bunny Cake, and I made it at Lea's for last Monday's dinner. Now, I had made this recipe once before, in December 2009. It's super, super easy. In fact, the end of the instructions indicate that "It's so easy, any dumb bunny can make it." (I'm foreshadowing here...). So I only had to pick up one ingredient: pie filling. I chose cherry, because it was on sale. Plus I love cherry anyway. So here's how you make the recipe. You take your pie filling (2 21-ounce cans) and pour it into the bottom of a greased 9x13 pan. Then you sprinkle one box of yellow cake mix (dry) over the pie filling. Then you melt two squares of butter and drizzle it over the cake mix. Here's where I made my mistake: interpreting that 2 squares. I decided it must mean 2 tablespoons, because those are pretty "square" when you cut them off a stick of butter. So I melted my 2 TBSP of butter and drizzled. Then I baked at 375 for 45 minutes. And when I pulled it out, the spot I'd drizzled stood starkly contrasted against the rest of the powder cake mix. Hmmm. Now, I knew that wasn't how it looked before when I made it. So after much discussion with Lea and calling me mom (both of whom agreed that 2 squares would, they would have assumed, be 2 tablespoons), we decided it probably was 2 sticks of butter. And when we proceeded to melt that much and drizzle... Well that looked more like it! Fearing burning something, I only cooked it for 30 minutes the 2nd time. And I'm happy to report that it wasn't merely cake mix powder that came out of the oven the 2nd time. So yeah, that's 2 sticks of butter. Very healthy indeed. But it really is good. And easy, once you know the trick. So easy that any dumb bunny can make it ;). Hahaha. (When we saw that line in the instructions after my first failed attempt, we laughed quite hard...)