I may have just given us Hypertension

Saying that my cooking skills are lacking is an understatement. A large one at that.

I had one amazing food day in my life. It was this years Thanksgiving with the boy and roommate. I made some pretty tasty yams. The boy actually likened them to his Grandmother's. Nice.

*I thought now would be a good place for a cooking picture of me, however, there are no pictures of me cooking that I could find, except one. And this isn't even a legit cooking picture. I'm just stabbing the knife into the meat to look like I'm doing something.*
Beyond that, I cannot cook. Well, I can maybe make a pizza (home-made actually), or even rice with teriyaki veggies (this got me through finals week). Still though, food is not my forte.

Tonight I decided I was going to cook Parmesan Crusted Tilapia with buttered noodles. Sounds good right? I thought so too.

I began by finding a recipe online. I settled with one of Rachael Ray's recipes. She seemed legit. Next I pulled out the frozen tilapia fillets from the freezer. I wasn't even sure you could bake frozen fish, so to Google I went. 'Can you bake frozen tilapia'. Enter. This was a good start. Next, I covered the frozen tilapia in "paprika", (That is in quotations for a reason, you'll see why soon enough) and parmesan. Just sticking with the recipe. Then I preheated the oven to 400 degrees, and waited.

After about five minutes, I decided I could probably start the noodles while I was waiting for the oven to preheat, so I put some water in the pan, and put the burner on high. Waiting some more. The oven finally beeps, and in go the tilapia fillets. I got sick of waiting for the water to boil, so I dumped the noodles into the pot, and swirled them around once.

Five minutes passes. I decide to flip the fillets and season the other side. As I'm coating the other side with "paprika", boy walks in and says "that's not paprika". "Yes it is." To my surprise, it was actually not paprika, it was seasoning salt. Main ingredient being...you guessed it..salt. Why it's the exact same red color as paprika is dumb, but I thought it would be okay because it also had paprika in its list of ingredients. Oh well. No harm done. Maybe...

I swirled the noodles again, this time they stuck to the bottom of the pan because I didn't originally add enough water. The boy grabs the pan and fills up the pot a little bit more so that it can actually cook all of the noodles. I also flipped the fillets to the other side again (at least I can flip). They seemed to be doing well. Five minutes left on those.

After a while the noodles were done, and I strained them. I put them back into the pot and lost a lot in the process. You see, the strainer was larger than the pot, so they just fell out of the strainer into the sink, missing the pot completely. Still okay I think. A 90% average is really good in some things.

Tilapia looked done, I plated both fillets. It smelled really good, so I was expecting the best.

Boy takes the first bite, and he makes all of these weird faces because it's really hot. Or so I thought. I laughed because, duh, hot food will be hot straight from the oven, but no...it was really just exceedingly salty. Oops. Here's where that "seasoning salt" comes back to haunt me. The fish was overall cooked very well, but the taste was almost nonexistent.

Here's a picture of the delectable dish.
To express how great the meal really was, the boy had a few choice words to say. "You would make any professional chef cringe because you have a complete disregard for technique." Compliments.

Food rating was split into three parts as to prevent an averaging down curve.
Noodles: 7
Fish tenderness: 8
Taste: no taste score because his tongue went into a salt coma, so there was no taste.

It was so bad, that he's even saying he'll be cooking tomorrow.

I never really thought I was a bad cook, or had a problem with cooking...until today. I guess I really do spend too much time studying, and therefore I've really never learned to cook. I didn't think it was something you needed to be taught, but I thought wrong. The boy's getting the short end of the stick when it comes to my wifely cooking duties.

Positive end note: "Noodles were top notch, I'm eating them tomorrow." Success.