Mealgonewrong and Other Delicacies

College is a time of learning many things- specifically today I would like to address one lesson in particular which is of the utmost importance- how to, and NOT to cook.

Once you leave your parents' house and have a kitchen of your own you find yourself- gasp- having to prepare ALL of your own meals. This can be a challenging and exciting affair and leads to many new and interesting discoveries. You very quickly learn many lessons on how NOT to cook.

Lesson #1: Always check inside the oven BEFORE turning it on lest something flammable be stored within unbeknownst to you.

Lesson#2: Always be sure that you have burners on "low" when planning on simmering something like, oh, say, pasta sauce- lest you end up with a blackened brick rather than the delicious dinner you had planned.

Lesson #3: While freezing things like pasta sauce and chicken is a great idea, always be sure you plan which night you are actually going to use said ingredient. Otherwise you may think to yourself one night, "hey, I think i'll make something delicious out of that chicken i have", only to discover that, no-no you won't- that chicken is still in the freezer, frozen solid.

Lesson #4: When making something you've never made before, always be sure you really DO know what your doing before embarking upon the creation of said dish. It is not enough to say," I've seen my mother make this before, it's easy". When that is your thought process, you may be sure that disaster is all but inevitable.

When disaster strikes, however, all is not necessarily lost. Just when things seem bleakest and dinner a shattered dream there is the greatest potential for greatness. As proof of this, I would like to tell you of the creation of mealgonewrong (said in a French accent, of course). It was a Monday evening. We had chicken (not frozen), ground beef, and potatoes. We had planned on caramalizing the potatoes, but I, having not retreived the actual recipe from my mother, had simply guessed how to make them. The caramel, well i'm not sure what it did, but it wasn't what it was supposed to do. The caramelizing failed. So we threw all the ingredients into a skillet together with some herbs. It was missing something- so we added some onion. Still, it lacked something, so we dug through the refrigerator and pulled out some cheese. That was it! It was perfect, simple but perfect! Out of the ashes of cooking failure we had made something amazing- we had made Mealgonewrong!