Cooking

Now that Emily is here and I have less free time overall, I'm somehow finding more time to cook. And by "cook", I don't mean whip up a blue box of mac 'n cheese (although I do make a mean box of mac 'n cheese). I'm talking about actual, recipe based dishes that involve pots, pans, and occasional trips to the grocery store. In trying to figure out how I've been able to do this, I realized that cooking the perfect activity for me right now. First off, it requires me to get out of the house, but only on trips to the grocery store, where I can leave Emily happily strapped in her car seat while I roam the aisles in search of ingredients. Secondly, it gives me a something productive to do while she's sleeping, otherwise I end up playing too much Farkle on facebook.

When I really got to thinking about it, it dawned on me that cooking is like a live version of a WoW quest. You have to accept the quest, go out in search of the required items, and perform a designated number of steps in a particular order. The only difference is that when you're done, instead of having a Fine Leather Cloak, you've got a cider braised pork medallion. In either case, you get +2 to stamina.

So off I go to the grocery store, where instead of buying things like frozen pizzas and canned soup, I'm buying whole chickens and pork roasts and ricotta cheese. Which by the way, if you're looking for ricotta cheese, it's not with the other cheeses like parmesean and chedder. It took a phone call to my mother to figure this out, because neither I nor the walmart employee knew where it was. Turns out, it was near the cottage cheese, which I'm not entirely convinced is a cheese at all. But I could be wrong...I'm still kinda new to this.