For many years of my married life, I cooked everything from scratch. In fact, I was one of the last people I know to get a microwave. This began to slowly change as the kids grew up and I worked full time outside the home. Dependency on the microwave was the first step in my hating to cook. I started with microwave popcorn. Soon I was microwaving everything from left-overs which had initially been cooked the conventional way, to foods bought in microwavable containers and meant to be microwaved. How did I ever get along without the microwave oven? By the time the kids had moved out of state and had their own families, I was cooking maybe three or four meals a week in the conventional (non-microwave) manner.
As I got older and slower, I cut back on the standing for hours to prepare a meal to fixing whatever cooked fastest and dirtied the fewest dishes. "Real" meals, those made from scratch, became fewer and farther between, usually only appearing on week-ends or when the grandkids visited during the summer. I must add that my weight went up as the number of store bought microwavable meals increased. Not only were they usually calorie laden, but neither did they satisfy my hunger for very long. I began eating more between meals.
I finally have come to the point that I hate to cook anything from scratch and even some microwave dinners are a bother. We are lucky to get one made-from-scratch meal a week.
Now another reason I hate to cook is I hate the clean up. A good meal to me is one that dirties as few dishes as possible, even though I do own a dishwasher. Actually, I just cannot think about any part of the cooking process I enjoy.
All this comes to mind today because of my adventure in the kitchen this morning. DB and I had houseguests before and during the Thanksgiving holiday. We stocked the refrigerator accordingly. Thanksgiving was immediately followed by my getting a stomach bug that laid me up a few days, and then by DB coming down with it, necessitating his first ever trip to an emergency room to get treatment. Meanwhile our refrigerator was full of foods neither of us could even consider eating. So today I decided to cook to use up several of the items that needed to be used while still good. I found a huge pile of fresh kale, phyllo dough, what I thought was a bottle of spicy sun ripened tomatoes, asiago and mozarella cheese, and two pounds of bacon. Hmmmmmm. These things, although bought for separate dishes, could all go into one dish, using them up without having to do a ton of cooking or clean up. Perfect.
Everything started well. I washed and steamed the kale and then squeezed all the water out of it. I fried the bacon and drained the fat off it. I grated the mozarella. The asiago was already grated. I drained and chopped the sun dried tomatoes and then rolled and buttered each layer of phyllo dough. I mixed chopped kale, crumbled bacon, sun dried tomatoes, and a little egg together and began to fill phyllo dough until I had six nicely stuffed pastries. Into the oven they went. Because I clean as I go, I was pretty proud of how little clean up was left. I turned from the oven to start final clean up when I saw the cheese still sitting on the counter! Arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. I immediately opened the oven and pulled out the hot baking stone loaded with pastries.
If you have never tried to take apart buttered and rolled phyllo dough---don't start now. It is impossible to do without destroying the pastry. It took me two pastries to learn this. So, back into the oven went the pastries sans cheese. Darn. To top it off, the sun dried tomatoes were red bell peppers. I only noticed this as I eyed the bottle they came in now. Oh well, I like peppers. Drat. I spent over an hour making these things just to screw up. I should have stayed in bed.
But, suddenly, the "Aha!" syndrome hit. I had it. I would put the cheese over the pastries after they baked and then pop them back into the oven to melt the cheese. Hey, better than no cheese at all.
So, once the pastries were a rich golden brown, I did just that. Meanwhile DB enters kitchen and says, "What is that smell?" Now, by the tone of his voice and look on his face, I knew he did not mean this in a positive way. "Lunch." was my curt reply.
"I'll just start with just one." This meant he would start and end with one. I am mentally calculating how long it will take me to eat all these pastries left over.
So we sat down to our lunch. Let's just say it was low cal. While it was not bad, it probably will never appear on the menu again in any way, shape or form.
Now, I still have mozarella, asiago, bacon, kale and phyllo dough in the refrigerator to be used, but now they are in a different form and in only one container and take up a lot less space.
This experience has convinced me that the only meals worth going to a lot of trouble to make are the ones made by someone else. I would rather be quilting.
