OK, I love food. No surprise. And I've gotten used to thinking I'm pretty good at making food, too. So it's always a bit of a shocker to have an evening that's such a total and complete cascade of hilarious and frustrating events. Frustration is currently in the oven, probably burning.
Let me rewind for a minute. I get several cooking/foodie vegan newsletters sent to me...see prior comment about loving food. I like getting inspiration and new ideas, keeps me from getting stale and just going back to the same dozen dishes again and again (which I tend to do...I love me some foodie faves).
Cue the recipe for mushroom and broccoli casserole. Sounds good, right? OK, it has pasta...and I almost never eat pasta....but the mushrooms and garlic and nootch cheese sauce...but the pasta. Hmmm.
Fast forward to yesterday. Browsing the local health food store, I come across quinoa pastas! Brilliant! amazing! Protein! Tiny singing food angels!
Quinoa pasta, folks, is $10 a bag. Yes, I bought it. Shut up. This casserole was going to happen, and it was going to be gourmet, apparently. Gourmet Casserole. Now a thing.
This evening I foray into the kitchen...sashay, even, spatula in hand, to make said casserole. The oven is preheating. The music is playing. The ovaries are cramping.
what?
Now, it needs to be said again that I almost never eat pasta. So, everything I cook in large pots that gets boiled is lentils or beans- both of which you put into water, and bring to a boil. You know, if you put a very expensive bag of quinoa pasta absent-mindedly into a pot of water and plop it onto the stove to bring it to a boil what you get is gelatinous goo, burned to the bottom of the pot (possibly ruining a $80 pot, but let us not dwell on that yet.) that in no way resembles pasta.
Failure #1.
While this is happening, I'm merrily scrubbing mushrooms and broccoli and, to save time, I decide to throw them all in the food processor to chop them rather than do it by hand- along with the garlic and the onion. I then proceed to chop them too fine, so they're really tiny specks of food...one step away from paste. Now I have green and brown paste to mix with my pasta paste. Umm.
Failure #2.
Well, no worries...I have the Gelationous Goo draining in the hopes that it will somehow magically reassemble as fusilli, and I decide to cook Failure #2 as directed in the recipe, lightly. Done. OK. Success. As this is simmering, I get to the blender to make the cheeseish sauce to go into it.
cheeseish sauce calls for:
almond milk
nutritional yeast
cashews
smoked paprika
cornstarch
brown rice miso.
what I *actually have* looks more like this:
vanilla almond milk
vegan fake parmesan shaker cheese
macadamia nuts
smoked salt
corn flour
red miso paste.
Failure #3- goes into the blender! In for a penny, in for a pound at this point in time.
oh WAIT. And, where is my casserole dish? Gone, you say? Why yes. You would be correct. Gone...somewhere. Hiding, likely under a pile of missing socks in some alternate dimension. I do have this other casserole dish...which is just slightly too small for all the ingredients, causing over flow immediately and terrible mess.
Failure #4.
But we are almost ready to go! I just have to put my Panko breadcrumbs on top and I'm in the home stretch. I have a whole bag of them right...here. Here? Or...maybe there. Or, in fact, no where. Time to use the ancient scrapings of some no-name breadcrumbs from the back of the top shelf that aren't even mine. Perfect.
Failure #5.
Time to put this Frankenstein's Monster of a cascade failure into the preheated oven and...wait. The oven is barely warm. Of course. I check the temperature (350, yes). I'd been prepping for over 15 minutes, the oven should be perfectly heated...except, of course, it is not.
Failure #6,
well, let's just throw this in the oven and see what happens. It says cook for 20-25 minutes. I've cooked it for 40. At this point in time I've taken it out of the oven just because I'm pretty done with this whole charade and would like it to cool down before I have to throw it in the compost and make myself a PB&J.
Oh, wait. I'm out of jam. Bugger.
