the queen in the kitch

“it’s already well past dinnertime and the only thing i’ve had to eat today is a couple of slices of buffalo chicken pizza served with a side of mayo. i don’t know what to make that doesn’t involve the stove or a box of cereal, so i’m sitting here hungry.” -jen lancaster

at the age of 19, i  managed to set a grilled cheese on fire (don’t believe me? ask the fiance, i offered to cook dinner for him…and yes, i decided on grilled cheese, and then i set it aflame. classy lady.) at 20, i served scorched lasagna at a dinner party. at 21, i turned to eating honey nut cheerios and drinking a bottle of sauvignon blanc for dinner. and at 22, i mastered the art of boiling the peanut sauce in a lean cuisine until it solidified (yes, i was using a microwave. yes, i grossly underestimated the wattage, your point?) i guess i just assumed that cooking skills developed with age, and that one day i’d wake up 3o, successful and possessing the cooking abilities of tom colicchio’s sous chef. (when i was a child, i also thought this was where babies came from. i presumed that one day i’d wake up 30, successful, married, possessing the cooking abilities of tom colicchio’s sous chef and (tada!) pregnant, all without even the slightest amount of penetration. thank god for public school sex education or i would have inevitably been first in line to star in MTV’s teen mom.) when i turned 23 and still had the propensity to create flambe out of pan-seared pork chops, i realized i would have to take matters in to my own hands. here’s how i did it, and i’m pretty sure if a former failed-microwave-chef can do it, so can you.

the SizeQueen started simple:

sure it was slightly embarrassing to google things like “how to chop garlic?’ but thanks to the site’s commonly-googled-questions-auto-population feature, i realized that i was not the only person who had no idea how to mince. everybody has to start somewhere, even if that somewhere is holy-hell-how-did-i-ever-pass-home-ec?but i quickly realized that once you’ve got the basics down, everything else is pretty easy. sure, there are lots of things i don’t (and won’t) know how to cook (read: creme fraiche, bouillabaisse, or that creepy foam shit that marcel insisted on using incessantly during season 2 of top chef,) but i realized that i’m fully capable of reading and comprehending and thus, am fully capable of following a recipe.

the SizeQueen gets confident:

once i learned the difference between broil and boil it became pretty easy to determine how to cook what. sure there was “the great spiced corn muffin disaster of 2010,” but these things are just going to happen (TEAspoon versus TABLEspoon, apparently there’s a big difference.) i started out sticking to recipes down to the fluid ounce, but this really isn’t necessary. once i got comfortable in the kitch(en) i was making changes to my favorite recipes left and right. this is the glory of cooking your own food!

the SizeQueen starts a revolution:

being able to cook has revolutionized the way that i eat (and the way that i spend money.) prior to cooking i was living on lean cuisines and was one box of smartstart away from being a top shareholder in kellogg’s cold cereals. i was far from famished (i had an emergency stash of baked cheetos and swedish fish if i ever ran out of food,) but i certainly wasn’t healthy. now that i cook most of my meals i eat these things called vegetables and other healthy stuff that hasn’t been processed to the point that it could survive the apocalypse (you know that show on the history channel called life after people? yeah, baked cheetos were on there. they finally decayed sometime between the crumbling of NYC’s skyscrapers and the death of the last single-cell amoeba. and i wonder why my intestines hate me.) but the point is, if i can cook, i am sure you can, too and i’m sure you can reap the benefits just like i did.

queen in the kitch originals:

two bean turkey chili

pumpkin chocolate-chip bread

This page has the following sub pages.

• two bean turkey chili
• pumpkin chocolate-chip bread