Macaroni, bleh

Jennifer loves cooking shows, Iron Chef esp. And she loves to cook, sometimes. And cleaning up? Never.

But after looking through a cook book, she took a wild hair to eschew Kraft's mac and cheese and make homemade macaroni. My hubby sniffed at the idea: "I like it from the box"

Great, we shot back. While you dine on that orange dye #2 stuff, we'll dine on haute cuisine made with real butter. Just like Julia would make it.

So off we went to the store to buy 3 kinds of cheese and heavy cream (not a Weight Watcher's recipe this one). And we got to work. The kitchen looked like a disaster when we were done. And since you had to make a roux of sorts, the stove was a mess. As we put the last few ingredients in, we stopped.

Nutmeg?

Yes, it called for a dash of nutmeg. So we took a pinch and threw it in, and popped it in the oven. 20 minutes later, the entire house smelled like we were baking eggnog. And it tasted like it too.

Since Gary had refused to eat the stuff on principle, he was in the TV room fixing a broken DirectTV box. So we did the rare thing of sitting at the table and eating a meat we'd cooked ourselves, from scratch. And it still tasted like eggnog. So we both grabbed for the salt and pepper about the same time and laid it on.

The taste was better, but not great. And certainly not worth all the work we put into this. Gary tried to be gracious, and told us, after deigning to eat it, that it wasn't that bad.

We knew he was lying. But we appreciated the effort.

Food Network

It's always hard to get the remote out of my hubby's hand (no story here), but now, it's getting more difficult to wrest it from my daughter's control, as she's become obsessed with the Food Network. We're watching the Worst Cooks series now (literally, these guys can't boil water).

As an upside of this however, she's gaining more interest in cooking (wants to try a mac and cheese receipe that's not out of the box-my hubby is protesting this) and so maybe, just maybe, if I can't get her to clean the kitchen without nagging, I can get her to cook dinner. I'll gladly clean up.

From scratch

That's the way our daughter wants to cook our T-day turkey. I usually, since I work until next thursday- go buy and pick up the precooked meal at Safeway. But Jennifer has been watching too many cooking shows - Bravo and HGTV.

I don't think she realizes that they chefs take HOURS to produce the end product, that's all nealty wrapped up in a one-hour show. And you don't see them cleaning up the mess. That's what production crews are for.

However, I hate to snuff out this interest in cooking, since it would be nice to come home to a meal once and awhile, so let's start unthawing that turkey.

I'll cook tonight!

At first I thought I'd misheard. My daughter wanted to cook dinner.

And even more astounding, she wanted to good breakfast for dinner, an idea that I love, but she's firmly resisted.

Apparently staying home all day for Veteran's Day got to her, so she started watching cooking shows, which got her in the mood for cooking, so she asked me to get the ingredients for French toast, my fav. on the way home. I happily obliged, however, the bread needed to be stale, or staler to not go soggy in the mixture.

But the family, hungry, wolfed it down. And yes, she did a Julia. We cooked with butter.

She forces me to text. I force her to boil water.

I guess in her world, I'M learning how to boil water.

My daughter, fed up with text stupidity, finally insisted I send my own wildlife photos to my other blog. She simply won't do it anymore. Fine. So she shows me how, quickly punching in the e-mail address, in fact so quickly her movements are a blur.

Uhm. How do I get the @ again? Mom, weren't you watching! Fine. So slowly, taking three times as long, I send over three photos.

Then she wants a noodle dinner, a fav of hers when she can't think of anything else to eat. It involves boiling water and dumping in pasta. Guess what she was doing tonight?