So last Tuesday my buddy Jay called me up to make sure I was fully aware that he was about embark on a House and cookies experience.  That got me thinking, some things are just meant for each other: milk and cereal, fish and chips, scooby-doo and shaggy, House and cookies….    You mean you’ve never heard of that last one?  The forever satisfying combination of medical mystery and gooey warmed cookie dough.  Let me explain:

About 3 years ago my roommate had season 1 of a television show called House in the apartment.  So I watched an episode.  One thing led to another, and I ended up watching the whole season within a week.  I never knew medical dramas were so amazing.  The wonderful combination of sharp wit, the conflict of realists and optimists, and blood and guts.  I wasn’t too keen on that last one though, I was never one for real-looking blood and guts.  Blowing up zombies is fine but as soon as you show me someone’s spleen being removed, I’m done.  Anyway, we began watching season 2 on TV each week and slowly many of our friends caught on.

Fast forward a year.  I moved in with Jay, another one of my House-addicted friends for our final semester at our undergraduate institution.  We decided to have the ultimate House season 3 first episode party.  We couldn’t just watch it on TV either…  So we ended up splitting a movie projector off Ebay for a good price.  Jay also bought a remote-control giant projector screen off Ebay for $3! (Plus an additional $200 for shipping and handling which nobody noticed until after the bid was made).  The projector arrived a day before the season opener.  We scrambled to find a cheap VCR which are basically obsolete by now but we needed a tuner to interface between the cable connection and the projector.  We finally found one at Salvation Army.  Needless to say it was a good night.  We repeated this event every week.  Soon we had an epiphany (I’m not sure how it happened) that half cooked, gooey, chocolate-chip cookies go strangly well with the television show.  And today, 2 years later, cookies and House are still happily married.  The season opener of season 5 was Tuesday and it was amazing as usual.

The End.

Oh yeah, and just because Jay called me, Rachael decided to make homemade delicious cookies to also enjoy on House night.  It was amazing.  But I do miss that projector.

How do people learn to cook for themselves?  Some are fortunate to have a mom who passes down recipes or may they got to attend a cooking class in school.  I followed a much different route: I taught myself.  Now don’t get me wrong, I am in no way saying that I am a good cook.  In fact, I would say that about 40% of anything I make is either disgusting, or less than par.  But I’m learning.  I cooked for myself through most of college until now.  Except now I only cook part-time since Rachael is a very good cook and my belly thanks me when I let her control the kitchen.  Since I’ve started sharing the kitchen with a woman I’ve learned that I have a very different attitude towards cooking than some.  Maybe you can relate…

My cooking experience has several steps:

(1) my stomach tells me I’m hungry

(2)I look in the cupboards and refrigerator to see what we have

(3) pick several ingredients that look like they go together

(4) pick (sometimes at random) a method to apply heat: George Foreman grill, stove top, deep fryer, oven, propane grill, or microwave.

(5) cook food

(6) eat.

This method, as you may have noticed, is lacking any foresight or direction.  But It does have the distinct advantage of helping clean out the fridge and cupboards of foods left over from other meals.  Like maybe we have a piece of chicken, some onions, and a tomato.  If I stir fry those up with some olive oil and butter and put it on spaghetti, I have a great meal!  This method doesn’t work so well with some things as I found out.  Especially baking cookies.  I have found out a couple times that baking requires special attention to quantities of ingredients.  Therefore, baking is not for me.

So from my time experimenting in the kitchen, I’ve come up with my top 10 tips for all those aspiring men trying to make some food for themselves:

(1) never try to bake cookies with pancake mix.  (2) don’t put oil on the stove on high, and then leave for 20 minutes because that starts fires! (3) in the case you do start an oil fire (which I have NEVER done and certainly NEVER almost burnt my family’s house down with an oil fire), use baking powder to put it out. (4) Use lids on pots to help the water boil faster. (5) Twice frying things makes them crispier. (6) Olive oil should be used in everything. (7) Emeril’s “original essence” seasoning is the best stuff ever and goes on EVERYTHING taking guess work out of which seasoning to use. (8) Girls like guys who can grill. (9) There is such a thing as too much garlic. (10) If something you made tastes bland, throw some hot sauce on it.

If you have your own tips, feel free to comment!

If my life were a story, I think I would be on about the end of Chapter 3. Chapter 1 is the early years. Chapter 2 is self-discovery. And Chapter 3 would describe how I fell in love with a beautiful girl, and eventually asked her to marry me. I just turned 24 and am about to finish to first year of my marriage to the girl of my dreams. The middle of Chapter 3 would definitely describe the wedding and that would be where most chick flicks end. However, my life is a bit more than a boy meets girl drama. It’s real life.

So here I am thinking of starting Chapter 4. I think I’ll call it: “Mark gets a job and figures out where he and his wife should live.” Yikes that’s a bad title, I’ll have to get Rachael to fix it for me (she’s good with words like that). But that title about sums up where I am in life. Responsibility has finally caught up to me and I now need to start thinking about my new family and the direction we are headed. I wish Chapter 4 could be: “Mark retires early and moves to Colorado to attempt to snowboard every day of the 2008-2009 snowboard season.” But it isn’t. Not to say I won’t attempt to snowboard every day. But there are just some things which are more important. Like food, and health, and education.

But Chapter 3 (I think I’ll call it “The love story chapter”) is not quite done yet. On September 8th, Rachael and I will have been married a whole year. It sure went by fast and I must say it has been everything I expected and everything I didn’t expect at the same time. Rachael is my best friend and although I see her every day, I haven’t ever gotten tired of seeing her. Its sort of a miracle really. Theres nobody else I would want to spend every day with besides her. But thats not to say that a new set of challenges have arose. Finances, apartment issues,and having to include another person in all your plans are all difficult. However I think we are getting through each challenge as it comes just fine.

So while most of this blog will be about my life as it happens, be prepared for some unexpected flashbacks from some of the previous chapters! Thanks for reading and God Bless.