This is how you pretend you're a really good cook.

Thursday, February 2, 2012

It's really easy to fool someone into greatly over-estimating your culinary skills.  All you have to do is have a handful of seemingly difficult (but secretly easy) and impressive dishes in your pocket.  You pull one (or more) of those out on appropriate occasions and voila!  You look like a serious cook.  It's not until someone eats multiple meals that you're cooking that they realize that you only know how to make so many things.  The goal is, that by the time your subterfuge has been discovered, they've fallen in love with you/become your best friend/are so enthralled by your sparking personality and wit that your dismal abilities in the kitchen don't even matter anymore.

I did this on a bigger scale with Thanksgiving dinner in 2010 for my father and it totally worked.  He loved the entire thing and thinks I'm a killer cook.  (I kind of ruined it this Thanksgiving when it didn't turn out as well, but the glory of a year ago might still be enough to cloud the sad memories of this year.)

I'm starting to gather recipes that will fulfill this deceitful plan. (I really wanted to use the word nefarious instead of deceitful, but I know the situation isn't dire enough to use it.  Wouldn't that be awesome though? A plan involving recipes that is wicked and criminal enough to actually warrant the use of nefarious?)

Anyways, Hannah and I came up with a killer peanut sauce (by came up with, I mean, googled, obviously) and realized that making spring rolls is deceptively easy.  (Why am I using so many ridiculous words when I'm talking about cooking?  Deceitful, killer, subterfuge... nefarious?)

We use rice noodles and rice paper, cucumber, lettuce, carrots, avocado, shrimp (optional), mint and cilantro.  
Just google summer/spring rolls.  It's so easy.

What did I say?  Impressive, right?

I found a dessert to add to my list.  (The other dessert I can whip up?  So easy... Take your George Forman grill, and throw sliced peaches on it.  Right as you take them off - and arrange them beautifully - sprinkle some brown sugar on them.  It'll melt and be amaze-balls.)  This is called a Three-Ingredient Nectarine Galette, but I totally count four ingredients.  I'm not stressing about the accounting inconsistency, because this thing looks GORGEOUS!  (Imagine I just sang out that word.)

Riiiight?!?!?!

It says that you can use berries, apples, cherries, or any seasonal fruit.  I'm so excited about trying this one out.  I'm pretty sure I'd look like a total bad-ass pulling this out of the oven.  (In my world, bad-assness involves nonchalantly pulling complicated-looking pastries out of the oven.)  

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Other super easy/looks complicated/tastes amazing recipes I'm willing to share? This sun-dried tomato pesto couscous is fantastic.  I always up the pesto to couscous ratio and add a few more sun-dried tomatoes to the mix.  Take out the Parmesan/butter (totally do-able) and it's vegan!

We can't forget the entire dinner from Katrina's 30th birthday party.  That was a total pretend-like-we-know-what-we're-doing-because-we-suddenly-don't-have-anyone-to-cook-dinner moment and we rocked it.  Bri, Loryn, Mel, and Matt?  You know how awesome we are, right?


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