Cooking for the Continental Man - The Intro

So I haven't blogged in a week - Perhaps because I've been bogged down with hosting faaabulous parties, doing school work for a change, facebooking, watching American Idol etcetera etceteroo... AND I've also because I've been doing a lot of cooking!

Isn't that amazing? ME... Cooking!!

I've never been a deft hand in the kitchen... Like most other women of the negroid persuasion, I can get by in the kitchen and produce something edible, but unlike most other women of the negroid persuasion, that something edible is usually the product of hours of cursing, sweating and furious spillage-control. I don't enjoy cooking but then its something I've always wanted to be good at. One of my New Year's resolutions this year was to become a "domestic goddess" and on January 1st, I planned to achieve that by vowing to cook myself at least one meal a week for the entire year.

Well.... Three weeks passed and I did no such thing until a series of events that led up to me having a fridge FULL of cooking ingredients that were bound to expire within a couple of days if I didn't do anything with them.

On Friday night I placed an order for groceries online. Stuffing my basket with the usuals - chocolate, biscuits, bread rolls and poptarts, I checked out and thought nothing of it. On Saturday a very grumpy looking fellow arrived late (and he still had the audacity to be grumpy... scheeeuuwww) with a mountain of shopping bags. I should've worked out then that something wasn't quite right but I was in the process of getting ready for my partaaay at the time and so really the groceries were the last thing on my mind.

Anyway I eventually decided to unpack them and began to groan in the process. I uncovered FIVE Butternut Squashes, Two MASSIVE tubs of Porcini mushrooms, Three packs of puff pastry, Onions, garlic, chillies, cream and loads and loads of other things that you would order if you were say... in the mood to have a Christmas party?

I worked out after a lot of fuming and more cursing, that I'd forgotten to remove certain items from my online grocery basket which had been placed there by yours truly in December when planning for the Christmas party she was scheduled to have in LAGOS! Needless to say that I'd already HAD that Christmas party, in Lagos, on December the 23rd, and thus had absolutely NO use for all the very fresh, non long-life, non processed, non preservative-stuffed food that was blocking my path in my very tiny kitchen. P.S. I also have a very TINY fridge!

Anyway after the party (an astounding success mind you... teehee!) was over and done with, I woke up refreshed on Monday morning (Sunday was a complete write-off), and decided I was going to have to cook my way through the jungle of fresh produce.

Now... I'm one of those bad beles who thinks (even though she can't cook) that people who say they can cook when all they can really do is follow carefully laid-out procedures and pictures in recipe books, are pathetic. I don't think they qualify as good cooks because they aren't doing anything creative or spontaneous.

To cut a long story short, this week will diarise my journey into the hitherto forbidden forest that is my kitchen. I've already come up with 2 recipes of which I'm rather proud and will share in a minute. I've called it "Cooking for the Continental Man" because:

1) I only ever cook for men (be they boyfriends, brothers, cousins, hungry friends) as its not worth going through all that hassle for myself alone - I really don't appreciate it and would rather spare myself the torment by just picking up the phone and dialing well-memorised numbers, and

2) When I filled him in on the joys of this creative recipe-development process, the "man" in my life a.k.a. he who shall not be named, asked me why I was wasting my time with all this "mede-mede" when efo elegusi is the key to unlocking his soul!!!

Therefore... pleasing the Yodi is clearly not the object of this whole exercise, and I've invented a fictional character - "the Continental Man" who won't "mmm" and "aaahh" sarcastically when hearing the ins and outs of my culinary delights!!

P.S. Ummm.... The theme is Butternut Squash.

P.P.S. Please understand... I have FIVE of them (and five massive ones at that) to get through. I'm literally eating, breathing and shitting butternut squash.... Squash Squash Squash Squash Squash Squash Squash Squash.....