just like martha

Last night, Monday night, was the second installment in my five part series, “Try to Cook Some Things During Lent Because This Is a Skill You Really Need to Acquire.” I selected my recipe from the “Everyday Food” cookbook, which as I understand it, is kind of like Martha Stewart for Dummies, in that Martha Stewart is in some way involved, but too embarrassed by the simplicity of the recipes to have her name front and center. The recipe I chose: Tortilla and Black Bean Pie.

I chose this recipe for several reasons. One, I love black beans. Two, the recipe called for 12 ounces of beer, which thoroughly intrigued me. While I may not need some of these spices I have to buy ever again, I can sure put the rest of that beer to good use. Lastly, it featured no meat, and as I mentioned in my last cooking entry, preparing meat scares the hell out of me. The middle ground between raw and burnt? I do not know how to get there with meat.

Anyways, Monday at 5 I left work and set out for the grocery store to procure such exotic ingredients as canola oil and scallions (known pseudonym: green onions). Well, Monday at 5 was a hellacious time to be on the roads. You stand-up comedians out there might be saying that anytime is a bad time to be on the roads in Atlanta, and to that I say, hardy-har-har. Most days, I have a fairly easy commute, but yesterday, the City of Atlanta thought it would be a good idea to get three lanes of traffic down to just one for some road work. It took me an hour-and-a-half to go five miles. Make no mistake about it, I was testy. Then it was off to the grocery store for more stress. After bumping buggies with my fellow 9-to-5ers for awhile and trying to figure out exactly what a jalapeno chile was, I was exhausted. And frustrated. It turns out no one makes 10 ounce packages of frozen corn, Martha Stewart! I can go 16 or 32 but I can’t go 10! And I don’t want any leftover corn! WHY ARE YOU MAKING THIS SO HARD ON ME?

It just occurred to me that not everyone calls shopping carts “buggies,” but that’s actually what they’re called. Don’t let any damn Yankee tell you any different.

As I loaded my groceries in the car, shooting stink-eyes at the nearby shopper who was going to leave his buggy in his parking space rather than returning it to its appointed carrel, I had to fight the urges rising in my body to abandon the plan. Just go get a nice burrito, instead, the voices whispered. You’ve had a hard day. You’ve been sitting in traffic forever. The last thing you want to do is go home and cook. But I resisted. “Oh no,” I said to myself. “We’re going to see if all those people who said cooking was relaxing are full of shit or not.”

So off to home I headed. I laid out my ingredients. Here they are:

Before I started anything, though, I watched a YouTube video on how to dice an onion because I’ve had a lot of insecurity about that act since high school, when a friend’s mom told me I chopped onions wrong. A bunch of girls were trying to make tacos for a sleepover, and apparently I was the only one who couldn’t handle my assigned task. Actually, probably a lot of my issues with cooking, as well as some issues with self-esteem, stem from those sleepovers. But I digress.

With some YouTube knowledge behind me, I began dicing and mincing and grating and whatnot. It went pretty well. One frustrating thing to me is that the instructions say 25 minutes of prep time, but that doesn’t include all the chopping and so forth. It assumes 25 minutes once everything is ready to go. But you know Martha Stewart or her minions are not allowed to buy pre-chopped onion, so I don’t know why they don’t add a little chop time in there. Maybe if I ever get a cooking show, it can be called “Prep Time,” and it will just show what happens before the recipe actually ever gets going. It will basically just be me watching videos on the internet and trying not to cut my finger off, I guess. Oh, and drinking. If the hypothesis was to see whether cooking can be relaxing, then the experiment was actually rendered null and void by the wine I consumed while working my culinary magic. Was it the wine, the cooking or the television on in the background that relaxed me? Too many uncontrolled variables.

As I drank, most of the ingredients went into the skillet for some skillet time. The beer was all boiled off or distilled or off to beer heaven I guess. Here is that very process in action!

Then it was time to layer the bean and corn mixture with the cheese and tortillas. So here was my big downfall. Whenever I read that the tortillas were supposed to be cut to fit the shape of a springboard pan, my eyes kind of glazed over. I figured a tortilla was a circle, and why should I cut off some of the tortilla just to end up with another circle? But when I started assembling the layers of the pie, I realized that the springboard pan must be some circular pan that would help my creation keep its shape. Without this so-called springboard pan, the pie ended up being a little unwieldy. But now, at least I know what a springboard pan is. It would have been nice if they just called it a circular pan. Is it that one with the thing that goes around at the bottom? I guess that's the thing that springs it from its form. Not that I had one, but still.

The uncooked pie. You can't really see all the layers here.

The pie after some baking:

One slice for dinner, served with salsa, the rest to be eaten throughout the week.

The verdict: This recipe was delicious. It is hard to go wrong with cheese, tortillas, black beans and onions. But, I do have to point out that this took almost an hour for me to make so that it was in this arrangement, and most of those things probably could have been, like, microwaved and smushed together to create the same taste, right? So was it worth it? I don’t know. All I know is that only two recipes in, I am learning countless lessons about myself and about kitchen vocabulary.