Cooking Like A Pro with Emma: Basic Bitch Pretzels

Everyone knows Sunday is the Lord’s Day (Lord = Dionysus, god of wine. I didn’t even look that up. I knew that off the top of my head.) So what better way to worship than to get your Basic Bitch on!

1. Start this recipe by getting Starbucks, going to Whole Foods with LKel, or the galpal of your choosing. Bring a reusable grocery bag. Save the earth.

2. Get ingredients. Also buy chocolate covered pretzels for a snack. It's not redundant.

3. Drive home. Now that you’re not getting behind the wheel anytime soon; it’s time to drink!

4. The truly devout partake of the lord’s daydrunk favorite, Mimosas! 

Praise be unto him.

5. Sustain injury on foil. There aren’t even knives involved in this recipe. Feel some semblance of shame or irony, it’s hard to tell the difference.

6. Ok, do the thing with your yeast. Add more water because that’s not enough. Thoughtful steps like these are part of my chefly prowess.

7. Bread Hooks Maiden Use!

Please sponsor my blog, Kitchen Aid. Or send me free attachments or something.

8. Knead dough for literally forever. (6 minutes). Take turns because neither you nor LKel have any upper body strength.

9. Now you wait. There is like, so much waiting in pretzel making. Make sure you use your time productively, I.E. watching LKel clean your house for you.

Pictured: Hestia, Goddess of Domesticity, AKA Laura Kellum

10. One million years later (one hour), the dough doubled in size!

11. Cut it up and make it into pretzel shapes. Get annoyed by that and just roll some little pretzel sticks because you’re lazy.

12. Put them in water with baking soda. Do not overboil, or else you will make a mess for LKel to clean up. Also they will fall apart immediately when you put them in the pot, so use a spoon with holes.

13. Wait a few centuries (15 minutes). Ugh. So long. Getting Hangry. Pass the time with trivia crack. Get all the sports questions wrong.

14. Put melted butter on your weird, engorged baking soda-y pretzels and add toppings of your choice. I chose butter, sodium, and sodium with garlic.

15. Preheat your oven for a week and then stick those bitches in there for like, three to five years. (20-25 minutes). This is the last time you will have to wait. (So much waiting though.)

16. Pull all those mustards you’ve been collecting in your fridge out and enjoy.

“OMG, these pretzels are totes delish!” She white girled, white girlily. 

Cooking Like A Pro with Emma: New Year, New Cake Recipe

Congratulations, you’ve really stuck with your New Year’s Resolution of going to the gym! You deserve a cake. But it has fruits and vegetables in it! It’s healthy! It’s only 350 calories per serving!  (Let's disregard the fact that there’s 15 servings in this cake for the sake of our MyFitnessPal entries shall we?)

Here’s your recipe!

Ok, get all your shit together and take a photo for when you rewrite this blog professionally for money. 

Here it is. Wow! Ohh, Ahh.

1.     Alright, mix up your dry ingredients and set aside. I also added a teaspoon of ginger.  Altering the recipe already. Who do I think I am?

2.     Grate your carrot with the cheese grater that came in a pack of kitchen tools you got freshman year of college. This will take approximately 100 years. This thing is a piece of shiiieeet. (Note: This was written in Clay Davis’s voice, by the way.)

Sheeeeeiiiitttttt.

3.     Become wildly frustrated by shitty grater.

4.     Frighten animals with agitated cursing.

See: Fear

5.     Have momentary freak out that you just saved this draft document to your work’s shared computer. Remember that your boss is your facebook friend and will probably read this anyways. (Hi Susan!)

6.     Successfully bribe any roommates, significant others or strangers living in your home into doing your work for you while you blog.

I found this homeless man on the street and solicited his help.

7.     Butter and flour your cake pan. You will have to do this twice, because you only have one pan, because the other one was reappropriated as a dish for the chicken’s water. It’s the price you pay for those farm fresh eggs that you are not using in this recipe because chickens are real useless at laying eggs in winter.

Note: The chickens have a really nice water dispenser now and I have no idea where that pan is.

8.     Combine your wet ingredients and sugar. 

Important Question: Seriously, why does buttermilk only come in a quart? I’ve never needed that much buttermilk ever.

9.     Mix the walnuts, coconut and carrots. You got these from the dry food bins at whole foods, which you have totally done before because you are healthy AND hip. You definitely didn’t need to wait to see where the girl with dreadlocks in yoga pants got the bags from.

10. You should know that you are are wildly bad at estimating how much a cup is. You should have at least a cup left over of both walnuts and coconut. Later in this blog you will claim you did this on purpose, for the garnish. 

11. Omit raisins from the recipe, because raisins are bullshit. They are liars pretending to be chocolate chips.

Disgusting.

12. At this point you should accidentally delete the recipe from the app on your phone and then panic until you relocate it. 

13. Other than that, this recipe is going very smoothly. It definitely has nothing to do with abstaining from alcohol though, don’t worry. Lucky coincidence. Wine forever!

14. Holy shit this cake has to go in the over for an hour? Don’t want to do that twice. Improvise. 

Also maybe read your recipes all the way through before you start cooking.

15. Ok, so there was no butter in that cake, so let’s go ahead and use a whole stick for the frosting. Butter!

16. Add cream cheese, vanilla and sugar. Soften all of these things or else you will have to de-clog your kitchen aid like five hundred thousand flippityscrillion times, no exaggeration. Also that is a real number. That I made up.

17.  Add a couple teaspoons of maple syrup to your frosting for shits and giggles. If your maple syrup is a product of Canada or comes from a container shaped like a person, a real life Vermonter will crash through your door and punch you in the face.

18. Realize you have not had any dinner. Go ahead and stick a pizza in with the cake, so it will all be ready at the same time and you can eat pizza while your cake cools. I’m a goddamn genius.

19.  Pack your lunch for tomorrow and do laundry. This has nothing to do with the recipe, I just wanted to let you guys know that I am not always drunk and actually pretty responsible. #explainibrag

20. Be really glad you checked on your cakes after 30 minutes, because they are done. 

21. Miraculously, the cakes slide out of their respective pans beautifully. This buttering and flouring the pan business is awesome. Take that, $32 springform pan that I couldn't afford. I don’t need you!

22. Pizza Intermission. Cake cools.

23.  Trim Edges. Frost Cake. Garnish.

24. Holy Shit! It’s fantastic. And too pretty to eat. So take pictures and dip the edges in leftover frosting.

Hell Yeah.

Cooking Like a Pro With Emma (and LKel and Beard): Thanksgiving Edition!

Fifteen days after Thanksgiving seems like as good a time as any to share a this step-by-step tutorial on how to make Pumpkin Pie! Or stuffing. I'm not 100%

1.     Dress up for your Thanksgiving meal. I decided on Juicy sweatpants, fuzzy slippers and a shirt that is ambiguous on whether or not you are wearing a bra, because I am a classy woman.

2.     Start by finding a recipe for Pumpkin Pie, because you walked in to this prepared. Side note: Turkey will be done in like 35 minutes. Timing.

3.     Forget that you did not buy pre-made crust. Curse Self.

4.     Take first recipe you find off Google search. Make Laura smash graham crackers. She is a good helper. 

5.     Feel ingenious for buying cinnamon graham crackers instead of lame, regular kind of graham cracker. That’s gunna be good. Your cooking is so inventive. Way to be. 

6.      Before you even start the pie, get distracted by the fact you haven’t made stuffing yet. Take care of that real quick.

7.     Get distracted again by the idea of making spiced eggnog. 

8.     “Basic bitches love spiced eggnog” – Laura Kellum

9.     Drink rose. Basic bitches also love Rose. Embrace it. You’re wearing juicy sweatpants. THANKSGIVING IS NOT A TIME FOR JUDGEMENT. 

10. Realize you don’t have a springform pan. Worry about this later.

11. You have none of the ingredients for your stuffing, which is literally just an onion and some chicken stock. Things are looking grave.

12. Try to melt butter in microwave. It makes a very concerning smell. Make Beard melt it on the stove instead.

13. Is this butter for the pie or stuffing? Not sure. Mull it over with some wine. 

14. Finish glass of rose. Be drunk immediately because it’s the only thing you’ve had to eat/drink today.

15. Encounter first of many problems.

16. Lost 1/3 cup measure. Everything in this recipe is in 1/3 cup measurements. Just eyeball it.

17. This pie is going to take three hours. Dinner is in like 20 minutes. 

18. Get distracted by skyping with parents. Laura Kellum secretly does the dishes, because she has a cleaning problem. See photo evidence below:

 

Yes, this is Laura Kellum vacuuming crumbs off her own Thanksgiving Table, Monica Geller Style

19. Dinner will be ready in 10 minutes.  There is no pie. Panic.

20. So much more distraction, lose track of blog post. The stuffing is also not ready. Dinner is in 5 minutes. 

21. Throw all ingredients into Kitchen Aid Mixer in no particular order and blend. For the pie, not the stuffing. Wait, what are we making?

22. More panic. Beard saves the day by using turkey juices to make stuffing. Laura Kellum saves day by actually staying on task and making pie. 

23. Hey, this looks right!

Featured: Blog Post; Rose

24. Put pie in the oven.

25. Stuff face with delicious turkey and take credit for delicious stuffing you did not actively participate in making. 

26. Pie will take like 25 minutes longer than recipe declares it will. Take it out every three minutes to poke it with a toothpick, and then exclaim “How is this not done yet!?” This ensures thorough cooking. 

27. Wait for pie to COOL?! (like people have time for that, I mean, really.)

28. After using extent of willpower to wait for pie, (25 minutes) break and eat it slightly warm pie. It is delicious. Waiting is for chumps. 

29.  Enjoy rest of Thanksgiving. Be thankful for friends who stop by and don’t judge you for being drunk and wearing pajamas while it’s still daylight. You guys know who you are.

Happy Pajamasgiving, Everyone!

Cooking like a Pro with Emma Part Duhx (#Rustic)

Today I intended to write blog about Spaghetti Bolognese for adult job’s blog. Below is what actually happened:

1.     Supplies: Here’s the Recipe. I’m eliminating bacon, and if you stop reading because of that, I understand. But I am adding booze. (Red Wine).  And Spaghetti Seasoning, which I got freshly ground from the work, the place that I should be writing the blog for, because they pay me to do that.

(Note to self: Decide to figure out how to make this post professional later)

2.     Open your red wine. So it can breathe. For the sauce, not for me, it’s three in the afternoon for fuck’s sake.  But taste a little just to make sure it’s good.

Just enough for a taste

3.     Prep. Realize literally every dish you need is dirty right now. Take five minute dish break, you slob.

4.     Need music for cleaning. I like listening to Lorde, because she’s 6 years younger than me and I’ll never be as successful as she is. Wait…Let’s just Spotify. Found Playlist called “Chillin' Sex and Cooking, Works With Everything" Let’s check it out.

5.     Make your Mer Poix*

6.     Get distracted looking up spelling of *Mirepoix. Become overly proud of self for very nearly spelling it correctly the first time.

7.     Have to make sure wine is breathing nicely and not corked. Just a sip.

8.     Have not actually started cooking yet. Do that. Here is all the shit you need.

Cropped out the dog treats so no one would get confused

9.     It is unreal how depressing this playlist is. Switch to "Teen Dance Party"  because you have no shame and that is obviously the best playlist on spotify.

10. This is mirepoix. If you are a professional, I think everything is supposed to be cut the same size. I am clearly not a professional.  It’s ok. Just call it “Rustic” and everyone will be impressed.

#Rustic

11.  Don’t add the garlic at the same time as the mirepoix. Nobody knows why. The internet says no though.

12.  Dance with dogs to Lana Del Ray’s "Blue Jeans" while you cook mirepoix until the onions look clear.

13.  Add ground beef. Or ground turkey, if you’re trying to be healthy. Or bison, if you’re trying to be awesome and you’re rich.

14. Add way too much balsamic. Hope that cooks off.

15. Add wine to pan and glass

16.  Have a real struggle with the can opener while trying to open tomato paste,  fling wildly on to laptop screen. Why do they make the cans so small?

17. Only use ½ the can of tomato paste. Why don’t they make them smaller?

18. Put on water to cook spaghetti like 10 minutes and 5 steps ago.

19.  Simmer Bolognese while you boil pasta water, Let those flavors really absorb, you know? #Rustic

20. Proofread blog while you boil pasta.

21. Wait, why does the water have to be boiling? Why cant you just put it in there when its cold? Research that on google.

22. Pause research to skip past Lorde songs. 

Ow, my self esteem! #Rustic

 23. Never complete research because food is ready!

24. Grate Parmesan cheese on there BY HAND. Lorde would never have to do this shit. Vow to buy pre-shedded cheese next time. 

25. Eat so much. All of it.

Yeah girl. #rustic