Cooking up trouble

It's possible I went a little overboard in my cooking efforts this week. Shutterbug sent me a cookbook of 30-minute meals, and so I picked a couple out to make on my night off work. On the menu: sea scallops with vermouth (over a bed of artichoke hearts and assorted other things) with a side of veal scaloppini with wine, mushrooms and green olives.

Now this is ambitious for two reasons -- the menu sounds very impressive and the meals involve a lot of things I was pretty sure I don't like (artichoke hearts, mushrooms, green olives, etc.) But I like scallops, meat and linguini. So I figured if I was going to expand my horizons, I ought to jump in with both feet.

Unfortunately, not everything went quite as planned.

I started with the scallops with vermouth, which wasn't much of a problem -- once I consulted a friend about what exactly vermouth was and where to get it. (Alcohol isn't exactly my forte.) I pulled that together pretty quickly and thought, "Hey, this isn't so bad!"

Oh, silly, silly Briguy.

I began with putting together the veal scaloppini by cooking the linguini. No problem. Then I started putting together the other stuff, which involved chopping a lot of things. I was very excited to be using my new food chopper (thanks to all who suggested it -- it's made my prep time infinitely shorter) but I'm still getting the hang of it. I wasn't chopping so much as obliterating most of the things I put in there. And I found out it doesn't work so well for raw bacon. That mostly makes a mess. And while I was scooping out this bacony mess, it occurred to me that I hadn't taken the blade part of the chopper out yet. I realized this when I sliced my finger on the blade.

I quickly used a paper towel to put pressure on the wound while removing the rather sharp blade and putting the rest of the bacon into the frying pan. This gave me two to three minutes before the next ingredient needed to be added.

So I ran into the bathroom and tried to stem the flow of blood. Eventually, I got to the point where I could put a Band-Aid on it and went back into the kitchen.

Onion was next on the list, so I cleaned the chopper out and began peeling the onion over the trash can, trying hard not to use the middle finger of my right hand because blood was starting to seep around the Band-Aid and I didn't want to get it on the onion.

Then my eyes started to water.
It was about that time that I dropped the onion in the garbage can.

Luckily, it landed on a plastic bag I had stuck in there only moments ago, so I picked it up, washed it off and finished what I was doing. (Don't look at me like I'm gross -- it's not like I was George eating an eclair out of the garbage...)

Anyhow, after that was chopped and added to the mix, I went back to the bathroom to replace the bandage and that pretty much took care of that. But shortly after that, after cooking the meat, the directions got a little confusing, my scallops were getting cold and I was tired of all the cooking, especially since at that point I was just making things I didn't really have an interest in. So I just ditched the rest of the recipe, added the veal to the linguini sans the mushrooms, olives and the rest of that stuff.

At this point, it was also apparent that I had more food than I could possibly consume. While the Food Network's Rachel Ray was cooking multicourse meals for families of at least four, I was cooking for one. And I still had pan-seared shrimp and scallop skewers to make the next day. (They turned out just great, thanks.) But that basically gave me enough food for 12 meals.

I ate what I could (not a fan of the artichoke, as it ends up), and I'll be eating the rest for the next 5 days until the laws of good health demand that one throw the food out.

Next time, I think I'll just make one meal at a time.