I get by with a little help from my friends - and my husband!

You guys!!!  I did it!  I cooked!  And it didn't suck!!!


But let's be real - it was not without mis-steps.  It's me we're talking about here.


Sunday afternoon I went to two grocery stores and spent $50,000 buying everything they had to stock my refrigerator and pantry.  I realize now that cooking is much easier when you have a bunch of stuff on hand and you're not trying to wrack your brain for a meal out of a bottle of apple juice and butter because that's all that's in the fridge.  


First, I went to the Mexican grocery store because they have the best produce in the area, with more variety than the farmer's market and much cheaper too!  I stocked up on everything I saw.  Then I went to the meat counter to get some chicken for the chicken enchiladas that I made for our neighbor who had a baby last week.  That's my staple dish - it was the one thing I was pretty good at making.  I say was because I can now add Jennifer's tuna casserole and Shunta's bean soup to my list!  (Go to the comments here for the recipes - they're really good!)  But like I said, only after a couple of mis-steps.


At the Mexican grocery store, I found the beans in a bag before I found the canned beans.  I got the bags because I didn't think there was a difference.  Oh there's a difference!  Like an overnight plus two hours difference!  First mis-step.


After going to the second grocery store to get the rest of my ingredients I came come and spent Sunday making the enchiladas and some banana bread for Liz and Jason.  They liked them both, so I gave myself a little pat on the back for that one!


But then the bubble deflated a little when Drew pointed out that bag beans aren't the same as canned beans and they would have to soak overnight.  No big - I put them in a pot of water, figuring they would be magically soft by Monday night and I would make the soup for dinner.  HA! 


Next mis-step - measuring.  I had no idea how canned beans measured up to bag beans and rather than try and figure it out I just dumped the whole bags in the pot.  Y'all - beans swell and you should probably measure instead of dump, that way you won't end up with 80 pounds of beans.

Leftover black, navy and pinto beans.

We're eating beans for the rest of our lives.

I strategized all day Monday and I was really looking forward to making the soup for dinner.  Mondays are long days for me since I get up so early to teach, and by the time I get home I'm starving. I studied the recipe again and again, determined to make this work and getting hungrier by the minute.  It sure is a good thing it's a quick recipe!  

Imagine my disappointment when I got home and Drew had the pot of beans on the stove, cooking them with over an hour and a half remaining!  What the what!!  Apparently beans in a bag have to soak and then cook for two hours before they're soft!!  Inconceivable!  I could not wait another two hours before dinner!  What was I going to do?

Enter Jennifer's tuna casserole!!  I turned to my trusty recipes from my friends and her tuna casserole was only 20 minutes so I got to it!

My kind of recipe - dump it all in one dish and go!

Now, I didn't follow the recipe to the letter because it called for 12 ounces of peas and the bag of frozen peas I got was 16 ounces.  Again, I wasn't going to bother with measuring (probably why cooking doesn't always go so well for me) and saving four ounces of peas, so I just dumped the whole bag in the dish.  If I don't have exactly the amount the recipe calls for, but what I do have is close, it goes in the pot!  It doesn't make sense to me - when am I ever going to need exactly four ounces of frozen peas?  As a rookie, I know I really shouldn't improvise but some days I'm OCD about cooking, others I'm haphazard.  Which is probably why cooking doesn't go so well for me.

Anyway,  it also called for garlic powder, which we didn't have so I just used garlic pieces.  Minced garlic?  I don't know what it's called, we have a jar of it in the fridge and I used it.  How much?  No clue - a couple of teaspoons?  Heaping?  The Pioneer Woman I'm not.  I also felt like it needed something red so I added some tomatoes.  Drew made a salad for himself Sunday night and didn't use the whole tomato so I chopped up about half of it into bite-sized pieces and it in the dish it went!  Also, Drew ate one of the cans of tuna for his lunch on Monday so I was only able to put two cans in there but it still worked.

But other than that, I followed the recipe just as it was written.

Sprinkled with breadcrumbs.

I probably should have left it in longer to brown them but I was ready

to chew my own arm off at that point so we went with it.

We had a salad with our meals and let me tell you, the tuna casserole didn't suck!  In fact, it was yummy!  I think I should have used a smaller pan or a bigger can of cream of celery soup so it was a little juicier but it worked!  For my first dish in this journey of making friends with the kitchen, this was not bad at all.  Thanks for the recipe Jennifer!  I made a home-cooked meal for me, my husband and my baby!  I know most of y'all call that a regular Monday night, but for me this is major because I'm coming from dinners of mac n cheese and a glass of water.  This is big business!


After dinner, the beans were done so I went ahead and made those too and we'll have that for dinner tonight!  Two meals in one night - I'm on a roll!


Sort of.


I copied and pasted all the comments from my post into one long Word document and the bean soup recipe ended up on two pages.  Which is why this happened.

What happens when you're on a tuna casserole high 

and you think you're Martha Stewart.

The recipe said brown the ground turkey and onion and season the meat while it's cooking.  I assumed that meant the taco seasoning so I dumped it over the meat and then turned the page where it said to mix the taco seasoning with water and pour that over the drained meat!  I was already confused because I didn't think you had to drain ground turkey and I was all unsure about  when to do that but then I couldn't drain it because I'd lose my taco seasoning and I was all "I hate cooking!  I hate it so much!  I mess everything up, just forget it!  Mac n cheeeeeeese!"  Okay, well I didn't call out for the mac n cheese but I did throw a mini-tantrum.  Luckily, Drew was right there encouraging me, telling me I didn't mess it up and he just poured a little of the bean broth into the meat mixture and I stirred everything up, trying to coat all the meat with the taco seasoning.

 Bean soup before the turkey-taco mix

After the turkey-taco mix and a little more bean broth to make it soupy

What you don't see very well is this pot is huge!  This is a lot of bean soup y'all!  But guess what! Drew had it for lunch today and he called me at work and said to be sure to keep this recipe on hand because it was so good!  So I'm counting this as a win!  I even got some cornbread mix to have with the soup and it's the perfect fall recipe, all warm and spicy and stick to your ribs-y.

I'm so thankful my first attempts were easy and turned out well.  I'm so insecure and intimidated by cooking that if they hadn't I would have come back and been like, sorry y'all, it didn't work and I'm never cooking again for the rest of my life and my kid is living on fish sticks and mac n cheese forever.  

But I don't have to!  Thanks to my friends and my hubby who very intelligently didn't hover yet was there when he was needed, I'm a leeeetle less intimidated and a leeeetle more willing to branch out and try some more stuff.

Like next month - once all the bean soup and tuna casserole is gone.