This first week with my new ‘cooking challenge’ can only be described as a wild roller-coaster filled with frustration, accomplishment, stress, and delicious success. Who knew home cooking would be so hard and cause so much anxiety?

First of all it’s not like I’ve never prepared a home cooked meal before. In fact I try to eat at  home as many nights of the week as I can to save on expenses from dinning out. Usually though my home cooked meals are just fairly basic. Pick a protein, pick a starch, add some veggies and voila, simple dinner in 30ish mins. From my experience talking to friends and colleges in their mid 20s-30s this is pretty much par for the course. We’ve graduated from Mac’n Cheese and Ichiban college, we’re definitely nowhere near gourmet chefs, but ask us to bust out our one go to pasta dish and we can find our way to a basic edible meal.

This is the reason I decided to take on the ‘cooking challenge’ in the first place. Put plainly, my simple 30 minute meals kinda sucked. They weren’t bad but they were kinda boring and eating them again the next day for lunch was even more so… I desperately needed some variety. I wanted to spice up my dinners with some new flavors, I wanted to try some new recipes, and most importantly I wanted to improve my skills in the kitchen so I could actually attempt a dinner level above meat and potatoes.  Unfortunately what I quickly found out the hard way over this first week was that this next level of cooking also meant a whole nother level of preparation that I was So not ready for…

Monday: Meal 1 – Italian Drunken Pasta

It was 5pm on Monday, my first day of my new cooking challenge and I still hadn’t picked the night’s meal. I had been scrambling all day to get my work done and had been slightly distracted with some new features on my website. I knew I was already falling behind (even by my standards) but I thought, “how hard could it be to pick a recipe and cook it?”

Just before I closed my store I jumped on Facebook and noticed a friend had shared a video recipe for something called Italian Drunken Pasta. ‘Perfect,’ I thought. This seemed easy enough and video tutorials had worked out so amazing for me last time with building my WordPress blog.

I looked over the list and messaged my girlfriend that I would be home right after I hit the grocery store to pick up the ingredients. This is where things began to unravel…

The recipe called for 8 ounces of Pappardelle pasta which I assumed was just another type of pasta you could get at any grocery store. Oh how I was wrong…

Over the next hour and a half I went from grocery store to grocery store vigorously combing the pasta isles and harassing pore unsuspecting stocking clerks in a frantic attempt to track down this elusive Pappardelle pasta. Finally after an hour and a half of hunting I discovered it hiding on a bottom shelf of a small grocery chain on the other side of town.

It was now 7:30, I was frustrated and hangry and I feared my girlfriend being even more so (she gets the worst cases of hanger when she doesn’t eat). I rushed home, apologized and got to work on prep.

Prep took another 20-30 mins as I had to dice up onions, garlic, peppers and Italian sausage.

By the time we ate it was about 8:30 and Brit and had already had some minor kitchen squabbles spurring from our hanger overflow.

Luckily the meal turned out really well, tasted delicious and even looked kind of like the picture. If you’re looking for an easy meal to prepare and you know where to find Pappardelle pasta I would highly recommend giving this one a go.

Lessons Learned:

• Don’t pick your recipes at the 11th hour. Running around and scrambling to find random ingredients is not fun and a way better weekend job.
• That brown gunk at the bottom of your pan after frying your meat isn’t a burnt mess, it’s flavor! Sauté your veggies and use wine to lift it out to add to your dishes flavor.

Here is the link to the recipe and video walk-through