forced cooking

No, forced cooking isn’t some fancy new method of exerting enough force on your food to actually somehow cook it. (Although, that could be cool, and sounds like a real thing.)

Instead, forced cooking is what happens when I get a little ingredient happy at the grocery store and buy too many perishable items that need to be used STAT. Thusly, forced cooking occurs – in which I come home after work and/or school and then make dinner, which, tonight, I will eat at approximately 12am, right before I go to bed.

You should have been here yesterday. I was forced to cook pizza, although I played hooky from school specifically to do so, so I ate at a reasonable hour. The thing about making homemade, from-scratch pizza is that if it doesn’t turn out well, you just wasted pretty much your entire day. Yesterday the dough was not working with me, and I forgot to get mozzarella cheese, and didn’t put enough ricotta on in the first place. I did a red-sauced pizza and a white-sauced pizza – the red was better than the white, but neither were what I would call “winners”. PIZZA FAIL.

Tonight I am forced to cook a bolognese sauce, which I will then put atop spaghetti. Jaime Oliver has been known to steer me in weird directions (like that time I put a bunch of parsley into something because written in the recipe is a BUNCH OF PARSLEY, but apparently he just meant the more colloquial use of the word, not the literal whole BUNCH). Tonight he told me to put in two “heaping teaspoons” of dried oregano. It was a lot of oregano. (Yes, I used the teaspoon, not the tablespoon). Now that the smell of the bolognese is permeating our apartment while it sits simmering on the stove, I am questioning the amount of oregano called for.

The bolognese is not taking me as long as the pizza, but similar to the pizza dough’s 1-1 1/2 hr. rising time, this recipe has a 1 hr. simmering time built-in, which has me slightly distressed as to what kind of mental state I will be in if this doesn’t end deliciously.

Tomorrow’s forced cooking will be huevos con chorizo, which I’ve made a thousand times and cannot really mess up – so, worst case scenario, at least there’s that.

Wish me luck!