Easy Difficult Bake Oven

It’s kind of funny that my cooking career peaked before I was 25. Here’s hoping my future husband enjoys making dinner!

I kid...kind of.

Not that I don’t like to cook. I love making intricate, difficult, delicious meals with tons of ingredients.

But now that I live by myself - what’s the point? Part of what I enjoyed most about cooking is sharing the meal, watching other people enjoy it. Both filling and fulfilling!

Me, myself, and I really don’t really give two shits about gourmet dins.

Well maybe I would if I could - but I can’t so I don’t. You see, my rabbit hutch is rather ill equipped to handle any sort of epicurean feast. It’s not properly outfitted with real, grownup kitchen crockery and the sort (I am one of those few miserable NYC folks who went from having a dishwasher to not having one…devastation).
So because it’s just me, and because I don’t have a real stove (or any counter space whatsoever), and because I’m essentially cooking in my bedroom (it’s quite strange), I never really make much.

Boring, yes, but I eat the same thing practically every night: grilled chicken, veg, potato. Sometimes couscous. Maybe spaghetti and meatballs every now and again.

The keyword? Easy. You see, being the spoiled brat that I am, my mom still has a major hand in my dinner. She buys, trims, pounds, marinates, and grills me chicken breasts every time I see her. Which I, in turn, freeze and defrost as needed.

All I have to do is microwave a plastic wrapped potato and boil some brocc or asparagus and voilà - dinna is served.

(Wow, this all sounds quite disgusting. But hey, you’s gotta eat. And it does beat Ramen for sure.)
When I was home sick last week aaaaall I wanted was my mother’s chicken soup. Unfortunately I’m not super duper spoiled rotten - Trissi didn’t make me a pot and hand-deliver it to NYC.

She did, however, share her recipe - and I took matters into my own hands. Yessiree, I put my kitchenette to use and made my very own chicken soup.

Boy oh boy was it a pain in the ass.

I felt like a five year old making a cake in my Easy Bake Oven. Except instead of two ingredients - water and powder - I was juggling ten.

The most difficult part was the chopping. While I don’t have any counter space, I do have a little (very little) chopping block/cart type thing.
Using only paper towels and plates - I haven’t ever used a cutting board in this apartment - I impatiently chopped a sweet onion. I de-stringed, sliced, and minced five stalks of celery. But there was no where to put my chopped goods!

I had to use my bed as a surface while I diced half a bag of mini carrots and some large white mushrooms.

It was annoying. Infuriating. Troublesome. Tiresome!
As if making soup isn’t difficult enough - the all-encompassing time consuming-ness, the plethora of ingredients, the tasting and re-tasting, the stupid, insipid, never-ending simmering - I had to do all of this on a stove the size of a school desk...
...in an apartment the size of a r____t h____h. (Fill in the blanks. Though I do make fun of my apartamento mucho, I love it so and hate to talk too much smack).

Luckily there were no disasters. There was spillage and spitting from the simmering pot, and droppage of the choppage onto the floor. There were dishes and pots and silverware galore (cooking with no dishwasher is madness, I tell you, madness). There was too much soup for my small pot.

But in the end…unlike that funfetti cake I baked that poured out over the top of the pan and coated the bottom of my easy bake oven…there was, indeed, success.

Mmm mmmmm goooooood.