I’m not known as much of a cook.  My definition of “cooking” generally involves something simple like heating up soup on the stove, microwaving a chicken pot pie, or making mac and cheese.  If you ask me to do something more advanced though, like make a casserole, you may as well forget it because you’re inviting disaster.  Whenever there is a social gathering where everyone is asked to bring a dish to share, I’m that guy who comes with Chips Ahoy cookies or a can of Pringles.  With that said, however, I do have some recipes of my own that I thought I would share here on my blog.

Corn

I wrote my first recipe at the age of five when I was in kindergarten.  The whole kindergarten class each wrote one as well.  I don’t even remember doing this, but apparently, I did, and my mom saved it this whole time and shared it with me recently.  I will share it with you here.  This is my recipe for corn:

“When you mix it, it’s hot and when you don’t eat it, it gets cold.  Put it in the oven.  Cook it for 25 minutes at 60º.  Eat it fast.”

I’m sure your first thought is, why are we cooking corn at 60º, which is less than room temperature?  Although a valid question, I would like to remind you that I was five when I wrote it, so hopefully I can be given a little grace on that.  Perhaps you would like to follow the recipe as written, cook corn at 60º, and see what you think.  You never know; you might like it.  Perhaps you would like me to bring corn from this recipe to your next gathering.

Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich

Although now technically an adult, I’m known for my habit of making myself “6^th grade lunches”.  The peanut butter and jelly sandwich has long been a part of my diet, and even more so while working from home for most of the last 14 months.  It has even prompted one lady at my work to give me the nickname “PB & Jamz.”  So, it would stand to reason that I would include my recipe for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on here.

For additional context, a couple years ago, we had a meeting at work in which one of our trainers asked each of us individually to take a few minutes and write down the steps for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  The point of this exercise was, although everyone probably knows how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, everyone explains the steps differently.  Although everyone agreed on how a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is made, there were differences in what people had written down.  What exactly do we include in the materials?  Do we list the knife and the plate?  How detailed do we need to be?  Do we have to specify that the peanut butter has to be Jif?  How thoroughly do we explain the process?  Can we explain it in such a way where someone from Mars who is unfamiliar with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches will definitely be able to understand our directions without misinterpreting what we wrote?  It’s a good lesson for training people at the workplace and making sure that our process documentation is clear.  But it also inspired me to include my recipe for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches here:

Materials: Two slices of bread, one jar of Jif peanut butter, one jar of Welch’s Concord grape jelly, one knife, one plate

Procedure:  Place both slices of bread on the plate.  Use the knife to scoop out some peanut butter.  Spread the peanut butter on one slice of bread with the knife.  Repeat as necessary until the first slice of bread is covered with peanut butter.  Wash the knife.  Then, use the knife to scoop out some jelly.  Spread the jelly on the other slice of bread with the knife.  Repeat as necessary until that slice of bread is covered with jelly.  Put the two slices of bread together in such a way where the peanut butter side of the first slice and the jelly side of the other slice come together in the middle.  Once the two slices come together, you have created a sandwich.  Serves 1.

Optional additional step:  Use the knife to cut the sandwich down the middle in two halves, each resembling rectangles.  (Sandwich halves must be symmetrical; you may not cut the sandwich in half diagonally to create triangles, as the resulting halves will not be symmetrical.)

Spaghetti and Hot Dogs

If you’re a fan of The Big Bang Theory, you may have recognized this dish as Sheldon Cooper’s favorite food.  I recently decided to experiment and try this for myself.  I often cook spaghetti anyway, so I figured I would see what happened when adding little slices of hot dog cut up in it.  Although Sheldon is a weird character from a TV show, I think he may have been on to something in this case, as the hot dog slices added to the flavor.  If it sounds weird, just remember, meat in pasta dishes isn’t unusual.  For example, there’s chicken alfredo and sausage ravioli, and nobody thinks those dishes are weird.  And now there’s spaghetti with little hot dogs cut up in it.  This is now my most complicated recipe in my repertoire, and I will go ahead and share it here.  However, I will no longer go into painstaking detail as I did with the peanut butter and jelly sandwich recipe.  I hope that’s okay.

Procedure:  Boil some water on the stove and put some spaghetti in it.  Stir for several minutes.  Essentially, cook the spaghetti like you normally do.  Take some spaghetti sauce and microwave for 60 seconds (or until sufficiently hot).  Take a hot dog and microwave it for 40 seconds.  Cut the hot dog into tiny slices.  Once the spaghetti is done, put it on a plate.  Sprinkle some spaghetti sauce and the hot dog slices all over the spaghetti.  Then top it off by sprinkling it with grated parmesan cheese.  Bon appetit!

Any Two Foods Mixed Together

I have found from my previous experience as a church youth group leader that this is somehow a surprisingly effective way to gross out teenagers.  Here’s what you need: any two foods that don’t typically go together.  Just mix them and eat them at the same time.  For example:

Oreo cookies and mustard.  Procedure:  Attend an event in which sandwiches, other side dishes, and Oreo cookies are served.  Put some Oreos on your plate first.  Then, make yourself a lunch meat sandwich.  While you are squirting mustard onto your sandwich, accidentally spill some of it on your Oreos.  Decide “oh well,” finish getting your lunch, go to your table, and eat the Oreos, mustard and all.  They’re not great, but they’re not terrible either.  The reaction you get from teenagers at your table is worth it.

Pizza and veggies (a.k.a. Pizza Ryan Style.)  I really don’t understand why this one is supposed to be gross, because they have veggie pizza.  But here you go.

Procedure:  Attend an event in which pizza is served and a veggie tray is also available.  Veggie tray will typically include carrot sticks, celery, cauliflower, broccoli, and small tomatoes.  Take two slices of pizza and several small veggies from the veggie tray.  Every so often, put a veggie on your pizza and take a bite.  It’s exactly the same as eating the pizza and veggies separately, but if you eat them together, it may create a reaction from those around you for some reason.  Also, it can become a recipe you can take credit for – in my case, “Pizza Ryan Style.”

There you have it.  I never thought I would have a blog where I posted cooking recipes, but here we are.  If you’re like me and your cooking is a bit limited, and if you were searching for some new recipes to try, you’ve come to the right place.  Perhaps these recipes have made you hungry and you would like to try some of these yourself.  Go right ahead and let me know how it goes.  Or perhaps you’d like to share your own “cooking-illiterate” recipes here.  In the meantime, you may want to leave me in charge of simply bringing the Chips Ahoy or the Pringles.