Sunday, January 13, 2019

Vegetarian Dinner

"I'm making a healthy dinner tonight, so don't eat."

Skylar said it almost like a threat yesterday afternoon. I've tended to try to avoid these situations with him when I can. Not because he's incapable of preparing edible food, but because of all the commotion that I have to deal with while he's doing it.

We have an ongoing fight about whether or not one needs to follow a recipe to a T while cooking. Skylar starts freaking out because we don't have the exact quantity of an obscure spice in the form dictated by some snooty internet blog. I tell him to just consider the instruction as a general guide, but to use whatever he thinks might taste fine and whatever we have in the cupboard. He screams at me that he must follow The Recipe perfectly or we could die. I tell him he's an idiot. He says he hopes I get typhoid. I throw a pan at him. He goes to the emergency room. It's all very healthy.

And it drives me crazy.

When I cook, I just glance at the recipe and then make something in the spirit of whatever I've read. I'm not a phenomenal cook. But the things I make always turn out fine. People like them. You can rely on me.


Skylar's best prepared meals are miles ahead of mine. But we eat them at 2:00 in the morning because he way underestimated how long it would take him to call his sisters every two and a half minutes to ask them how to turn on the stove.

I was bracing myself for general annoyance and another ER bill as I sat at the kitchen table doing some work while listening to clanking and the occasional scream going on in the kitchen.

After some time, Skylar summoned me for dinner. He had made a "vegetarian broccoli casserole," he told me. "But, I made some alterations to the recipe!"

It was like music to my ears.

Our little boy was finally venturing off into a whole new creative world. One where he was no longer bound by the decisions of a faceless woman in Ohio who just had to share her husband's favorite meal!

Then he told me about his "alterations."

"The recipe called for milk but we didn't have any so I used vanilla soy milk," he said.

"That sounds disgusting," I told him, trying to imagine in what universe a grown human could think that vanilla and broccoli and cheese could possibly go together.

"I'm hoping the vanilla was cooked off while it was baking," he informed me, like a Mormon mother who used a recipe that called for alcohol.

And then the smell hit me. Imagine that you walked into a candy shop and then some threw broccoli at you. Now add cheddar cheese.

Purely out of curiosity, I decided to try it.

I don't know how else to describe the taste than to say that it was like if you cooked broccoli in vanilla soy milk.

I literally vomited into the kitchen garbage can.

We were running late to something and had to leave right around then. Skylar, in what I can only assume was a fit of pride, told me he liked it and brought a bowl of it out to the car to eat while I drove and gagged from the smell.

If he ruined vanilla for me, I'll kill him. If he ruined cheese for me, I'll kill everyone.

And now, please enjoy Strangerville:


This time in Strangerville, Meg Walter joins us via phone to tell us about how a baby pooped inside of her and then ate it. Seriously. Also, we revisit an era when family television programs actually taught valuable life lessons.
Story:
Refrigerator Death [Repeat], by Eli McCann, contributions by Jennifer Friess, DeAnne Hale, and several others
Production by Eli McCann & Meg Walter

~It Just Gets Stranger

26 comments:

  1. I'm a Skylar level cook. I want the exact ingredients, in the exact amounts, the exact equipment and possibly pictures and schematics. And when it doesn't turn out, I feel horrible and want to destroy the kitchen and commit violent acts upon myself and others.

    Both of my brothers are intuitive cooks. They throw stuff together and more often than not it works. And if it doesn't, the shrug their shoulders and say 'eh, what can you do?' and move along. They are obviously sociopaths.

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    1. Can't agree more, I'm like follow the recipe or DON'T BOTHER MAKING ANYTHING! I don't know why I am this way but it is what it is.

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  2. This is amazing in so many ways. You describe my cooking style perfectly. My cooking style being like yours, not Skylars. I still think Skylar is absolute bae though. Amy Rose

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    1. Amy's and her husband's cooking is amazing. I have many times declared that I would watch a cooking show of them that consists of providing them with recipes and a poorly stocked kitchen, so they have to figure out how to still make something tasty but only use what they have on hand.

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    2. You are so sweet. I cook on a wing and a prayer and I guess years of experience. Devin is definitely the true master at our house. Amy Rose

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  3. When I was first married and suddenly cooking a lot more than I had before, I made some substitution errors that were pretty gross. The worst two being substituting garlic salt for garlic powder and substituting a can of chicken noodle soup for a can of cream of chicken soup. And one last error that I can't live down: it wasn't a substitution error, but I once accidentally dumped in way too much salt and pepper and instead of starting over or trying to scoop any out while it was still sitting on top of the other ingredients, I decided to just mix it in really well, so no one would see my folly. But oh boy did we taste it later. Why did I do these things?

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    1. Yay!! Haha. If you hadn’t come on here to tell these stories I was going to text you and tell you you had to. You have really improved though. My favorite was waking up to about 200 texts from you about Thanksgiving dinner in Africa- particularly the bit about gravy. DON’T USE CORN MEAL!! Amy Rose

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  4. This sounds like the time my brother-in-law decided to make a macaroni and cheese casserole to bring to Thanksgiving. The recipe called for evaporated milk, but he didn’t have any, so he decided it would taste just as good if he used the sweetened condensed milk he had in the cupboard. Everyone tried to eat it so his feelings wouldn’t be hurt. It was awful!

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  5. Meg had her baby on my birthday! I feel so special and honored. Congrats, Meg!

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  6. I've definitely made the "vanilla flavored milk substitute mistake for real milk in a recipe" before. It's definitely ruined vanilla flavored milk substitutes for me, but regular vanilla and cheese are still safe. At least those trips to the ER are 'learning experiences" and Skylar could probably write them off on his taxes as a business expense. Perk of marrying a future doctor.

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  7. I feel there should be a second blog that Skylar writes so we can get his side of these stories. Maybe call it "It Just Gets Weirder"?

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    1. "It Just Gets Tastier" or "It Just Gets Skinnier" or "It Just Gets Healthier" or "It Just Gets Six Pack-ier" or "It Just Gets My Hair Is Still Better Than His" or "It Just Gets Not That We Know What That Is" or "It Just Gets This Isn't Even America Anymore I Guess" I could see all sorts of blogs that Skylar could write. I'd read it.

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  8. Keep a can of powdered milk on hand and teach him how to use it as a substitute in case of emergencies like this. It's not ideal but it's a hell of a lot better than vanilla soy milk.

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  9. So that's why Skylar wanted to go to med school... The docs at the ER were starting to get suspicious!

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  10. For the record, I read this story to someone and he asked "and how old is this child?" lol

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  11. One time (before we were married for 900 years), Bryan made me “breakfast”...undercooked eggs with raw onion gently folded in. I waited til he was in the bathroom
    buried it in a shallow grave (the trash can), and began my hero’s journey: teaching him to make food (for me), that isn’t basically ipecac. Now he’s a gourmet ravioli maker, and my journey is complete.

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  12. I know this is super off topic, but can you embed Skylar's tweets into the side of the desktop blog? I love reading yours but I never get on Twitter so I literally only see them here. Skylar should get his seen too (since you like his posts).

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    1. Would it still be worth it to you if I told you he only tweeted 5 times last year and I retweeted more than half of those? (The two I didn't retweet were complaints to a company, as I recall).

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    2. Did you know that you can set Twitter to text you tweets from specific people you follow. Eli's tweets get texted to me. But now I gotta go follow Skylar too . . .

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    3. I am IllTwitterlate. That is fantastic information, Nicole! Thank you. Also, I need to know who to follow because my Twitter feed is super boring.

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  13. Thanks for explaining what happened with the birth and why Meg wasn't induced when we were all promised she would be. It almost makes up for her breaking that promise.

    Also - thanks for letting us know it was a repeat! I know you thought of me when you did that!

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  14. This scenario has just occurred in my local news. 3 kids got trapped and have passed away. https://www.wfla.com/news/florida/3-children-dead-after-found-trapped-inside-freezer-in-suwannee-county/1701602950

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  15. In reference to Meg's super popular Tweet... "Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it." C. S. Lewis

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  16. Wait. Eli if you can cook, why all the stories about your sisters refusing to allow you to bring anything to Thanksgiving? I am an Eli chef, a recipe is a starting point. My twin sis has always been a Skylar chef. She will make five trips to the supermarket and World Market to get the "right" stuff. My big substitution error was putting condensed milk in for real milk - I did add extra water to dilute, but YUCK. It was awful.

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