Cooking with Sam! (And Gideon. Mostly with Gideon.)

 So I've been cooking. I know this doesn't sound like a particularly impressive development, but it is for me. Prior to moving to Eureka Springs with Gideon, the most cooking I did was boil eggs or burn grilled cheese sandwiches. (More the former than the latter, as I severely burned myself making a grilled cheese sandwich when I was much younger and had slight PTSD about it for ten years. I have recently discovered that it really helps if you don't flip the sandwich using only your hands. Yes, I am ashamed that it took me so long to realize this.)

This past weekend, I made white gravy from scratch for the first time in my life. Gideon and I had biscuits and gravy for (what is becoming) our traditional Saturday night midnight breakfast. It started last weekend when we were watching Lost after consuming a late lunch. I suggested that we marathon the show and make breakfast around midnight, and since I offered to make the scrambled eggs, Gideon agreed. He made white gravy from a mix, which was good but not exactly the gravy I had grown up eating. This weekend, I decided to try the midnight breakfast again with the gravy I was accustomed to. I let Gideon watch television as I cooked. Just as I began cooking, my friend Kelby called me. I put him on speaker, which made me feel like the host of a cooking show.

"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh nooooo not the grease!" I exclaimed randomly as Kelby described his day. (I did not say this was a sophisticated cooking show.) At one point, I demanded both Kelby and Gideon tell me what half of three quarters was. Neither responded immediately, causing me to scream, "I NEED YOU TO TELL ME NOW!" (Again, not the most sophisticated cooking show.)

Long story short, the gravy was delicious and is responsible for my new cooking persona, Groovy Gravy Lady. I might have just made that up for the blog, but I am so satisfied with it that it could actually become a thing. Aside from the breakfast, I haven't been doing too much in the way of cooking. Gideon has really taken the reins on that, which is really helpful to me. He has been recently experimenting with pizza (which I call pizzer after seeing one of my less-literate Facebook friends misspell the word "pizza"). He made it last night and was kind enough to take photos of it for the blog. (In reality, I had to tell him, "Hey, take pictures of this for my blog" about five times before he realized I was being serious. He asked me if I wanted to be in the pictures and I said yes but only if BJ could be in the photos too. So in the first photo, you can see a delicious melty pizzer, a bowl that contained mushrooms and has been washed now - just in case you're reading this, Mom - and me lovingly strangling my cat. The second features a close-up of the delicious melty pizzer.)

Don't let his expression fool you. BJ was very, very happy about being photographed.

  

This is a thin-crust pizzer with garlic parmesan sauce. Toppings include sauteed mushrooms, spinach, shrimp, corn, and mozzarella cheese. 

We also made brownies from scratch but forgot to take a photo of those before ravaging them. Gideon does have a blurry cell-phone photo of me eating one of the brownies. I will not share it here to salvage whatever remains of my vanity after sharing multiple terrible selfies on this blog already.

So there you have it. I have transformed into a culinary genius overnight. On an unrelated note, I also received a master's degree in hyperbole.

(I really wanted to end this post there because it sounds so clean but I also wanted to add, "It was a crazy weekend; it almost sounds like I'm exaggerating it." I didn't know which way to go, so this is what I have decided to do.)