More (mis)adventures in cooking, and some other stuff too

Chapter 2 of Elsie Worthing and the Hydra's Curse has now been published. Every time Mugglenet accepts a chapter, I feel more motivated to write the next one. I've already started Chapter 3, anyway, but it isn't going right... I finally feel like I want to fix it and know how.

Of course, the site seems to keep randomly putting extra spaces in between paragraphs. I'd read that this was an error in the site's coding, and so I was able to fix most of them. There's one or two left but I don't feel like going through the whole process again... it seems strange, anyway, that once your thing is published you can change it however you want without waiting for approval again. I mean, what if you changed it to some X-rated thing all of a sudden?

Anyway, that's not what I meant to write about.

I made macaroni and cheese for dinner, which was an adventure in bad timing. The recipe said to start cooking the sauce while the macaroni was cooking. I started while the water was boiling for the macaroni. It said to melt the margarine then mix in flour and a bunch of spices. I mixed in the flour while the margarine was melting instead of afterwards, which I think was my first mistake. Nothing seemed to be mixing.

In the meantime, it was time to put the macaroni in. When I measured out the amount I was going to cook, I spilled a bunch of it on the floor.

Now I had to mix milk into my sauce. There must have been a hole in the bottom of my measuring cup because as much milk dripped onto the stove as into the pot.

I had to stir the milk into the sauce constantly until it boiled. Unfortunately, I was also supposed to stir the macaroni frequently, and I only had one spoon. I had this idea I could use the wire whisk as a replacement spoon, but all that happened was steam went up into my hand and I had to stop stirring. Besides, macaroni shells were getting stuck in the whisk.

In the meantime, the sauce was getting thicker and thicker and thicker. It was starting to look like pancake batter and stick to the spoon. I couldn't tell if it was boiling or not... there were little bubbles in it but they went away every time I mixed it.

After another minute, I decided the sauce was boiling, after all. I took out the shredded cheese to put in it. It appeared that last time I used the package, I forgot to close it. The cheese was hard and stale. It wasn't moldy or anything. Just... stale. Hard to mix in. And, of course, when I poured it in, half of it went all over the stove. (Notice a pattern here??)

So now my sauce was ready. I just had to add the macaroni and chopped vegetables. The problem was, though, that the macaroni was not cooked yet. I stared at the timer, willing it to go faster. It wouldn't. The cheese was melted, the sauce was so thick I could barely stir it, and... the macaroni still had five minutes to go.

I stirred the vegetables into the sauce, thinking that would buy me a minute. Which it did.

Then my brain started working and I took the sauce off the stove until the macaroni was ready.

After I had drained the pasta and mixed it back into the sauce, I needed to measure out exactly 1/2 cup, since that was the portion size. I was almost afraid to do this... I was afraid the cheese would all stick to the measuring cup and make more of a mess.

It worked out fine, though, and I had it with a veggie burger. Yum!

I don't even want to think about how I'm going to wash my dishes though...