After a tearful goodbye with my parents at the airport, I decided I needed something to cheer myself up.  Food usually does the trick (because to me a good meal = home), but the only problem was there wasn’t any food in my apartment other than cheerios, so I decided to go grocery shopping.

When I arrived at the store, I browsed at my leisure for a while and then walked out with a very random assortment of items, such as herbs de provence, granola, polenta, and dried pinto beans.  I can’t explain these choices except to say that it was an emotional afternoon.

Thankfully, I had the sense to purchase frozen macaroni and cheese because I was busy all day and still unpacking and was not up for cooking a full meal.

I got home and took that sucker out of the box and went to put it in the microwave.

Oh wait, I don’t have a microwave.

Undeterred, I searched the box for oven directions because I do, in fact, have an oven.  And people must have made frozen macaroni and cheese before there were microwaves, right? ……..No? ……..Frozen macaroni and cheese was invented for the microwave? Oh….…. Well, anyway, there were oven directions on the side of the box.

The oven directions said to unwrap the plastic and place the container on a tinfoil-lined baking sheet.

Oh wait, I don’t have any tin foil.  Bummer.

Not to worry, I actually bought stovetop macaroni and cheese because I found it before I got to the frozen section.  It was a long day of unpacking and I was tired and too lazy to take the stovetop macaroni back to its isle so I left it in my cart and purchased it.  Good thing, because I was ill-equipped to prepare for myself what seemed to be the impossibly easy dinner of microwave macaroni and cheese.

So then I got out one of my new pots, filled it with water and set it on the stove to boil.

Then I smelled something similar to what a hair-dryer that’s about to burn out smells like.   I turned the stove off momentarily and immediately called my cousin Lauren who I thought might have a similar stove at her apartment.   Luckily she answered and told me that that had happened to her before if it had been a while since she turned on the stove and that it was likely the cleaning solution burning off from when my apartment was prepared for my arrival.  Phew.

Confident that I was going to be eating dinner, I got the water back up to boiling and threw in the pasta.

Then I realized I didn’t have a strainer, but that was fine.  I would just use the lid to the pot to drain the water.   I only lost a few past shells down the drain.

As I was pulling out a bowl to put my pasta in, I saw that I actually did have a strainer.

Oh well.

I then made bake-and-break cookies without incident.  These are normally against my religion, but judging by the chain of events I just described, do you really think I had the ingredients, equipment or mental capacity to make cookies from scratch?  Ah, no.

The cookies weren’t terrible but they didn’t quite taste like home sweet home either.

Full of sub-par macaroni and cheese and square cookies, I continued to unpack and the cats watched, exhausted from tracking my quest for dinner.

Just as I was worried about the drive and hotel stay with the cats, I thought they might take a while to adjust to my new apartment.  As you can see, Gus is barely managing to hold it together on the sectional.

While things are going well in the living room, I think there is only room for improvement here in the kitchen.

Y’all come back now, ya hear?

Sugarlump