how to cook dinner

In the middle of the day, decide to make dinner. Know what to make--pumpkin enchiladas--but don't know the recipe. In fact, it turns out the recipe isn't even pumpkin enchiladas. It is just enchiladas with pumpkin sauce. Buy pumpkin, tortillas, and enchilada sauce. Those ingredients aren't right.


Call Christina, the foodie. Of course. Say: I need you to fix my dinner. Then tell her what you have, and then she'll tell you about the Aztecs and she'll give you a recipe for pumpkin enchiladas. It is the one you claim she successfully pulled out of her ass that one time. More cumin than chili powder, to make it more smoky. Put the sauce down in the sprayed pan first. Put some of the cheese in the pumpkin mix to thicken it up.


Hells yeah, Miss Christina. You tell her to expect future phone calls about what is in the refrigerator. Dear Miss Christina: I have a can of corn, a popsicle, and mustard in my fridge. Fix--my--dinner! Now it sounds like a game show.


Of course, it turns out you were wrong about the chili powder. You don't have any. The closest thing you can find, actually, is taco seasoning. The impromptu dinner? Pumpkin, cumin, taco seasoning, salt, and chives. The dinner gets classier by the minute. You wonder if it's worth the joke to call Christina back and let her know that really, the only thing you can find in the house are those fucking box elder bugs that have taken over the front door.



And of course, per the advice of the Michigan chef, you'll engage in drinkin' while cookin'.

You wish Christina were here. You wish anyone else were here. But you have beer, so you're okay.


You will remember that you are an adult. You must finish cooking the dinner, making the enchiladas, instead of shoving the pumpkin down your throat, uncooked. Have patience, young chef.

Soon, you will shred pepperjack and then sharp cheddar cheese. Some of it will go in your pumpkin. The rest of it will go on top of your enchiladas. You decide that you're especially clever and fancy. Before assembling the enchiladas, you warm the tortillas in a frying pan, making them just a little more crisp. The edges brown.


Christina told you to close the ends of the wraps, but that's the one thing you didn't listen to--you left them open, thin, tightly rolled. They're in a bigger pan. You think Christina would be okay with this.







Don't forget, as you channel the mighty Phone-cook: towel over shoulder. Preferably a checkered patterned or plaid towel. This substitutes for the apron. This is for wiping your hands and waving the smoke away from the pan when you accidentally burn the rice.

Hm. Cooking that dinner was so fun, that while it's in the oven for 30 minutes covered in foil, 10 minutes without, you decide to make a crumb cake. After all, you bought that coconut today, and cakes are fun.


Get out the cake flour. The milk, the eggs, the sugar, the vegetable oil, the vanilla. Make that mix. Easy. Put it in the pan. Tastes like white cake. Then start on the crumb part.

More flour. Brown sugar. Cinammon. Then: 1 cup--that's right, two sticks--of butter. You gotta make it crumb. That yellow butter, hot foam.


As you dump the butter into the bowl, you think of the episode of Down Home Cookin' with Paula you watched on the Food Network yesterday. She says: That's right, y'all, we're just gonna add that whole stick 'a butter in there. That whole sticka butter. You remember the drinking game--the one you invented with the Highland girls last October--where you have to drink every time Paula confesses a whole sticka butter has ta go on in there. Or when she confesses that her meal is worth the calories.

Looks like your cake might be worth the calories, too.


And by the time you finish it, by the time you do the dishes, the pumpkin enchiladas are done. It is 7:30. There are dishes soaking in the sink, because you learned as a kid--while doing the dishes at grandma's house--that if you claim dishes are too hard to wash now because they need to soak and then leave them in the sink, that mom will do them.


Plate that shit up.

Help yourself to another adult beverage. Drink to all of the friends who should be there with you. The roommate isn't home yet, so eat alone. It's delicious. It tastes like Christina, maybe, made it.