The cooking show idea:  In which the cooks have no idea what they are doing but their food tastes great.

In the spirit of “Chopped”

The pantry would be all the cheap ass version of everything.  Plus whatever was on sale at Krogers that week.

Find a way to allow the lick and reuse spoon method.

Allow time for mindless staring into the fridge.

When I walk into the kitchen to make dinner I very rarely have any plan or idea for what is going to happen there.

You know those people who have a “Thing” something they do a lot, that they pursue and put effort into and get a lot of enjoyment out of messing around with….well…my thing is not cooking.  Left to myself I make one huge pot of fried rice with eggs and vegetables and eat the same thing for a week.  Making healthyish food that my kids will eat…ha ha ha ha…forget them.  I have had enough trying to get those nut balls to eat stuff.  I’m gonna make what I want and if they eat it great and if not….breakfast is in 12 hours.  My husband on the other hand demands some variety.  Yes he cooks.  He is actually THE cook in our family…it’s his “Thing”…one of them…whatever.  But schedules and such leave a fair amount of the family cooking to me.  And so you will find me of an evening staring blankly into the refrigerator wandering aimlessly to the cupboards, trying to come up with a way to make peanut butter, carrots and eggs into a satisfying meal.  Of course I love the google thing for these occasions so once I have hopefully memorized the contents of my kitchen I make my way over to FOOD BLOG HELL.  I start typing what I have into the search window and see what pops up.  In this way I have found many interesting and horrible things and a good many gems as well.  I have all kinds of things “pinned” and my own little menu box at http://www.food.com but I tell you what…FOOD BLOGS MAKE MY HEAD SPIN!!!! (Whatthefuckshouldimakefordinner.com makes me feel better about it all but rarely comes up with something I A) want to eat and B) have the ingredients for.) (Food Blog idea: only post recipes using ingredients most people already have…only cell phone photography allowed).   I have become highly skilled at scanning past all the beautifully manicured pictures of each perfectly executed step of making whatever culinary delight the blogger has created all while waxing poetic about how making the perfect quiche crust reminds her of her moms dead cat whiskers.  If these people weren’t sadists they would list the recipe at the top of the screen and give my kid coma brain a break.  But I get it… they really want you to read all the foolishness they have taken their time to write about and photograph so beautifully….same as me.  So…with that in mind here are the things I came up with for dinner the other night.

Part 1.  Quinoa Egg Bake I have made this a couple times and using a couple different veggies in place of the spinach depending on what I had on hand.  I do it pretty much as written except that I add a lot more garlic than it calls for and I use dried thyme (who has fresh thyme? Even my time isn’t fresh…aren’t I hillarious).   The only other thing I do differently is that I don’t stir in the veggies. I mix everything together except the veggies then pour it into the buttered pan (Hell yes I use butter). I give it a shake so the quinoa evens out on the bottom. Then put the veggies on top and push them down lightly so that they are all under the egg but not mixing in with the quinoa.  If the quinoa doesn’t all get to the bottom you end up with weird crunchy bits of uncooked quinoa stuck to your veggies.  This reheats really well.

Part 2.  I shredded two carrots and two zucchini into noodles using one of these things (which is totally not worth the money by the way…save your wrist and some money and just cut your veggies into shoe strings or use the cheese shredder) cooked them with some chopped onions really quickly.  Put the onions in the hot pan, stir, stir,stir till they look a bit cooked.  Throw the carrots in…stir, stir, stir…maybe two minutes…then then zuchini…two minutes and you’re done.  Then I covered it with just the peanut sauce from this recipe.  I threw all the ingredients for the sauce in a ball jar and did the makin’ butter shake til it was all mixed together.

Tada! dinner! And it was really good too.

This is what the peanut butter and soy sauce looked like together in the bowl before I realized all my appropriate utensils were in the dishwasher.  Kinda twisted.