I can’t cook. There, now we’ve gotten that out of the way. I’m a lousy, horrible cook. And yes, I’m cajun, and I STILL can’t cook. But I’m nevertheless expected to cook on occasion, usually a couple of times a week. I try to get by with serving Subway sandwiches once in a while, but now and then I have to actually put a real meal together. So I am constantly trying to find EASY recipes.

Since when is a recipe with 18 ingredients considered easy? I was browsing a recipe site just a few minutes ago, and the list of recipes is categorized by the amount of effort involved in creating the dish. One caught my eye. It was a recipe for Beef Empanadas. Yum, I haven’t had empanadas since I lived in San Francisco years ago. The recipe is categorized as EASY. My first thought was that it seemed like empanadas would be a little difficult to make, but hey, it said EASY, right? Ok, so I clicked through to read the recipe.

ACK! Wait a minute. First, there’s a pastry section with 6 ingredients listed. Then, there’s a filling section with 12 ingredients listed. And finally, there’s a section for Chilean Salsa, in which it says to use the recipe for that, but there’s no recipe for it. So, this EASY dish contains at least 18 ingredients, and however many more is needed for the Chilean Salsa.

In addition, this recipe involves creating pastry from scratch, with ingredients like baking powder, flour, unsalted butter, etc. What? Are you crazy? People who cannot cook and who are looking for EASY recipes do not…I repeat…DO NOT have things like baking powder and unsalted butter in their households.

If I could cook, I would put together a website for people like me, in which the recipes would all be EASY, and none of them would contain more than 3 or 4 ingredients. Very few would involve slicing and dicing, and if a recipe said it would take 30 minutes or less, it would mean 30 minutes or less for the cooking-challenged. 30 minute meals for chefs don’t count. It takes me 10 minutes just to slice and dice one vegetable. Make me do that with 3 vegetables and you’ve just used up the entire allotment of 30 minutes, before the cooking process ever begins.

I’m sure there are probably websites out there that really are for people like me, but unfortunately, there are millions of recipe sites on the Internet. If you know of a good one that would never classify an eighteen-ingredient recipe as EASY, let me know. I need all the help I can get.

Oh, and just for fun, here’s the link to the Beef Empanada recipe for those of you who think creating your own pastry is a load of fun.

(from Smash Mouth. "AllStar" Astro Lounge. Interscope Records, 1999.)

Posted on April 10th, 2007 by DazzlinDonna
Filed under: Life