Why I'll never author a cookbook

My children like it when I cook for them. It is not so much the food that I make.. which usually isn't fabulous. It is the simple act of providing them with something.. that they cherish. I had my oldest request a meal the other day. What could I say? It had been awhile since I'd made anything and their father was out of town. I made chicken and rice. A nice convenient standby. My mom taught me to cook easy things with Campbells soup as the sauce. It's quite possible that those were really the only recipes I paid attention to.. Anyway, it was edible. We ate it. I also made some really yummy cookies from the gals over at Best Bites. Our best bites.com has some really awesome recipes. I only know about this from my friend's daughter Sabrina. She has tried and posted some of their stuff and I've made the recipes and they do really turn out. The pumpkin cheese cake from Thanksgiving was so good and fool proof I made it 3 times. But this weekend I made their Cadbury egg cookies ... It uses those small robin egg type chocolates all smooshed up in the cookie. Not the ones that taste like malted milk but the ones that are pure chocolate with a very thin shell. All in all... I was feeling pretty good about my weekend cooking.

Then tonight I got really hungry. Everyone is in bed you see and I was up reading a book. A juicy novel about a girl who really likes to eat. I suddenly craved macaroni and cheese. Not the Kraft kind that I used to crave as a younger person... The homemade kind that really sticks to your ribs. So at midnight I boiled the water, cooked the noodles and dove into the sauce making. Now here is where it gets dicey. I'm sure the girls at best bites don't have these issues. I'm quite confident that cooking for them is all doilies, pretty aprons and giggles. I bet they just ooze homemaking sweat out of their pores. They probably can't contain themselves from their collective cooking genius melding together... (okay that was really dumb)... But me .. Not so much.

I started in on the RUE. You see a rue makes one think of various things... like Rue the lady from the Golden Girls or "I may rue the day that I ..." But no a Rue is the base of a sauce.. It is like the flour, water, milk butter combination that gets your mac and cheese going. I can only say that it was midnight and I wasn't much for measuring. Perhaps I was impatient too... because my rue never really thickened. I finally just added the cheese and the spices and poured it over the now cooked noodles. It smelled very good... and as I mixed it all together.. I didn't care that it looked like soup instead of that warm and bubbly soft and creamy combination i had been hoping for. I drained some of the liquid into the sink and dove in.

I only really got through about 8 bites before my taste buds sent this memo to my brain... "Help.. It tastes like your eating paste." Now it is all sitting in my gut in a big ball of congealed yuckiness.

So my dear readers.. I will not be authoring a cookbook anytime soon. If you would like to go to a blog for cooking ideas.. I'd reccomend Ourbestbites.com or simple home gourmet.. which is written by my good friend Candace.. who is actually a chef. Sometimes she makes my family food and we all cry because it is so amazing.

The rest of the mac and cheese is in the garbage. Sigh. I'm so glad I can at least play the piano. Someday maybe I'll learn to cook a little better. Until then, I 'll keep trying to make the family meals when they request them.. and enjoy the nights when Kris makes the food (more often than not ).

Don't think I make this stuff up for laughs... IT ACTUALLY HAPPENS.