Cooking with K

When K and I got home Sunday from Austin, we decided to look up some recipes on foodnetwork.com. We found this great recipe for p!zzagna, which sounded fun and like it'd be pretty good. We printed it out and went to the grocery store for the ingredients.

As you all know, I'm not a cook. I can bake, but that's not the same as cooking. Growing up with an Italian grandmother and mother, K has been around great cooks his whole life. Thank goodness for that, because I wouldn't have known where to even find half the ingredients in the recipe. K started out in the produce aisle. That's always my last stop. He started searching for fresh parsley. I would have gotten parsley on the spice aisle and ignored the word "fresh." The recipe called for "1 onion." He told me to get it. I didn't know which color -- red, white or yellow. I thought the recipe always had to say. He started looking for the "crimini mushrooms (baby portabellos)" as well. I'd have looked in the aisle with the mushrooms in the jar. We needed a bell pepper, and the recipe gave us a choice of red or green. I'd have called my grandma to see which she thought would be best. K went straight for the green.

We needed one cup of ricotta cheese. I pronounce it like a true Southern American: "rih-COAH-duh." Not K. He says it with the full Italian accent: "ri-COHD-tha" (That was the best I could do to phonetically spell out an Italian accent. Trust me, though, it's adorable.).

The most embarrassing part of our ingredient search was when we were in the produce section getting the last ingredient from that section: garlic. The recipe called for 2 cloves, sliced. First of all, I'd probably have gone to -- yup, you guessed it -- the spices for that instead of the produce section. When K came back to me with only one head of garlic, I said to him, "We need another clove of garlic. The recipe calls for two." K looked at me incredulously. "If you put two of these things in there," he said, holding up the head of garlic, "it would be all garlic!"

Yes, yes ... I know. I'm pathetic. I knew it was called a head of garlic, but for some reason, I thought in the world of garlic, a "head" and a "clove" are the same things.

Once our shopping was complete, we headed back to my apartment to prepare our meal. As a neat freak who bakes, I prepare my ingredients as I go, and I clean as I go as well. Evidently that's a bad idea when you're cooking. I was confused that K had skipped over the first two lines of the recipe when we started cooking. Instead of preheating the broiler and bringing a pot of water to a boil, he was working on chopping the parsley. He explained that it's a good idea to prepare your ingredients before you start cooking, especially when you're having to do things like finely chop parsley -- and especially when you're doing that fine chopping with a steak knife (Hey, I don't cook, remember? What do I need a knife set for? In college, two of my roommates had knife sets, so I didn't need one. When I moved to Dallas, I figured K and I would be married in a year, so I never bought one. It doesn't seem worth it now, since we'll just register for a nice set anyway.).

I filled my new pot that K and I had just bought at Wal-Mart (because of course I didn't have one) with water to prepare for the pasta. I put it on medium heat, since whenever I'm cooking spaghetti in my littler pot, it always boils over because I'm multitasking and cleaning as I go. I figured I'd save us from that problem. Instead, K wound up noticing I'd only set the stove to medium and turning it up to high. Once it was finally boiling, I put the pasta in. A bit later, K asked me how long it had been in the pot. "I don't know," I said. "Maybe 10 minutes."

"You didn't set a timer?"

At that comment, I looked at him like, You honestly thought I'd have a timer?! "No," I said. "Is it bad if it's been in there 10 minutes?"

"Well, you have to know when it's done." He explained to me how it's bad if you overcook or undercook pasta, but of course I don't remember what he said, other than, "That's where a lot of people mess up on pasta because they don't cook it just the right amount."

"But I thought you know it's done when you throw it against the wall and it sticks," I said. K just laughed at me. I think he was in shock.

The recipe called for some sauteing, which would have turned me away from the whole thing to begin with. K told me, though, that sauteing is just cooking in a skillet and keeping the food moving the whole time. My response: Why don't they just put "Cook the ingredients in a skillet, being sure to keep them moving"? Makes sense to me.

I didn't trust myself with the sauteeing since I'd already failed at cooking noodles and even boiling water. Instead, I did one of the things I do best: I combined ingredients in a large bowl. That's my specialty.

Rachael Ray claimed the recipe would only take 15 minutes to prepare. It took K and me a little longer. Then again, Ms. Ray does have all those unfair advantages to help her whip up her recipes in record time: steak knives, large pots and an understanding of general cooking terms. That's like cheating.

GFF always posts such yummy-looking pictures of food on her blog. Since pictures of Vanilla Almond Special K breakfast cereal, hot dogs, turkey sandwiches and regular salads with bacon ranch dressing wouldn't quite have the same appeal as her photos of fresh fish, fresh fruit, homemade cakes and healthy, great-sounding gourmet foods, I rarely post pictures of food myself. This means I grabbed in a heartbeat the opportunity to take pictures of real food that was being made in my kitchen.





K preparing to sautee


















Ingredients + large bowl = Something I can actually handle!










K sauteeing the veggies.









Almost done!











It really looked like pizza!







When we were finished cooking, we took our lovely p!zzagna into my living room, where we ate at my coffee table while watching TV and sipping some wine. We enjoyed the fact that we'd made our yummy dinner together, just two years after our very first dinner together the weekend we met.