'Suspect Am Culinary Genius'

If you've ever seen Bridget Jones' Diary, you know that that ambitious statement ends in blue soup, orange marmalade and omelets. And she didn't even make the omelets. Or the marmalade.

As I'm currently looking for gainful employment, I have decided to become the housewife of my flatmate. This involves a lot of cooking, which, as she is an actual culinary genius, tends to be a little intimidating. I made dinner for the first time without any help a few weeks ago and it turned out great! Since then I have had many more successes (with slight amounts of failure) until today. Today was my cooking Waterloo. I got a cookbook that is supposed to incorporate a lot of veggies in seemingly innocuous form. I am starting to learn something that hadn't previously occurred to me (in a cooking context): if it sounds like it couldn't possibly work out, it's not going to. If someone told you that you could add puréed cauliflower to a mixture and still get cheese sauce at the end, you should really think twice. I kept thinking that it must be my lack of knowledge on the subject. It's not. So today, I did my super prepared grocery shopping--with a menu in mind and buying from the clearance sections--and settled in for a day of dips: namely, cheese and spinach/artichoke. I have made the spinach and artichoke before, but I neglected to realize when I found that pound of sour cream for .86 p that it was fat free and that that would make a difference. It turned into great globs of melted cheese with chunks of artichoke and spinach in a cream-ish brine. Sadly, it was the cheese sauce that pulled ahead (dramatically speaking). The cookbook says to boil cauliflower in chicken stock, purée it, put back on heat, add cheese, and purée again. Whatever the end result of this madness was supposed to be, the actual result was a cheesy cauliflower soup. I will never forget the way my dear flatmate sat there with a spoon, eating my 'soup' and said only 'It's got a great flavour profile--the flavours really work together,' instead of saying 'It has the world's mankiest, grainy texture and btw, you promised me cheese sauce for the tortilla chips'. Somehow, watching her gamely going on to finish the entire bowl (which I poured from a blender like it was a smoothie), and saying that if you added a little bit of rocket it was great, made me realize that this was one of the funniest moments of my life to date. It was even funnier than waking up this morning and realizing that a large part of my dream had taken place in the tavern from The Great Mouse Detective, complete with a human-sized mouse in a cabaret outfit singing jazz.

All I can say is, God bless those who eat it anyway.