Cooking with Metallica

The weirdest thing happened last night. I cooked dinner. Even weirder? It was actually pretty good! Yea, I know, totally bizarre right? I checked out some recipes on-line before I left to go home and then stopped at the market. Once I was there, I had an overwhelming desire for steak fajitas. Did I have a recipe for steak fajita? No, I did not. Have I ever cooked steak fajitas before? No, I have not. This may not be a concern for the avid chef, but I am, well, very far from being even close to good at cooking. It's just not my thing. I have always loved the idea of cooking, but actually doing it...not so much. I get overwhelmed but the whole process and pretty soon I'm second guessing every little thing. For a recipe to even be considered, there has to be a picture of what it should look like when I'm done. No picture? No go.

So you can see why me deciding on a last minute pregnancy induced whim of steak fajitas was a risky choice. Especially for my first real time cooking dinner for Rob. This could go terribly terribly wrong. Would he care? No, probably not. But I would be bummed and scarred from trying to cook again. I wandered around the store some more but I just couldn't get the taste of steak fajitas out of my mind. I had a decision to make. Call Rob and tell him we're going to Acapulco's for dinner, or bite the bullet and give cooking it a shot. Well, consider the bullet bitten. Yea, that's right. Me! I grabbed some onions, bell peppers, tortillas, meat, fajita seasoning, sour cream and fresh pico di gallo and didn't look back.

Once I got home, there was a little issue with the washing machine. The pipe was all jacked up and we sprung a major leak. All of a sudden I saw Rob jump up and run outside to turn the water main off and even though he did it lickity split, we were still ankle deep in water. (Note to self: buy a mop!) The weird thing? No tempers flared, no one freaking out or yelling. I think we even looked at each other at one point and laughed. Hmm.....this is sorta nice! We used all the towels in the house to soak it up and then turned on the fan to dry it up and wadaya know, we were good as new. Well, almost good as new. The downside is we had no water for the rest of the night. This would have been a perfect excuse for me to duck out of making dinner. But strangely, that didn't happen. I just kind of looked at Rob and said "are you hungry?" and he said "yea" and I said "ok, I'll start on dinner." Whaaa? Did that really just happen? Did those words really just come out of my mouth? Wow! That's pretty domestic (as my Skillet would say.)

I had no recipe, no step by step instructions and no picture to go off of, but I just went for it. I threw my iPod on the Bose, turned up some Metallica and dove right in. I chopped up the red and green bell peppers, then the onion. I put a little oil in the pan, started adding my ingredients...and it was a success! Rob had seconds and thirds and even fourths, that was a great feeling:) I was pretty pleased with myself, I have to say. Don't worry, I told him not to expect this kind of enthusiasm from me every day, or even every week. Just be happy when it happens, I told him.

This may have just been a total one off, who knows. What I do know is, I cooked dinner and for me, that's huge. Baby steps.....