I have been avoiding cooking (and even the near occasion of cooking) lately. (There's a new Ledo's by my house. Which isn't the Ledo's, but you can't always go to Adelphi when you want a pizza. Though actually, when I was in school and eating at Ledo's on a regular basis, I rarely had pizza. I was partial to the club sandwich and one called the Ledo Ham Delight. That is apparently no longer on the menu...you can't go home again.)
Anyway. So yesterday was Mother's Day. Now my sister and I hatched this perfect plan to combine Mother's Day with my niece's first communion party and have brunch on Saturday, getting us off the hook for having to do anything Sunday. But then by the end of the week I started to have these pangs of guilt that my mom was going to be stuck cooking her own Mother's Day dinner (or worse, that my dad would insist on taking her out on a night that can only be described as Restaurant Hell.) So I invited my parents over.
The house is a wreck, I have no food, this was not one of my best plans, but I had to forge ahead. (I did seriously consider a Ledo's pizza.)
Some time ago my mom asked me how I made sweet potato fries, so I decided that I'd make her some for dinner. I then had to build the rest of the meal around that. I have a bottle of Arnaud's remoulade sauce, which is great with sweet potato fries. Ok, we have a theme. I considered making a chicken marinade with cajun-y spice, but that's like cooking. Instead I wandered the grocery store until I found an Emeril Lagasse grilling sauce...he's from New Orleans, right?
So I had chicken and fries. Need a green vegetable...zucchini and stewed tomato is southern, and all I have to do is slice the squash and dump in canned tomato.
Once I had dinner under control it struck me that I didn't have dessert. I considered the black bean brownies, but that would have required getting the blender dirty. In the same spirit as the black bean brownies (which are amazingly good), I'd heard that you can make a cake with a can of pumpkin and a box of cake mix.
Well, you can.
Mix a box of spice cake mix and a can of pumpkin. (That's all. Really.) The batter is a little thicker than cake batter; spread it in a 9x13 pan coated with cooking spray. Bake for 30 minutes at 350 degrees.
That was good cake. I think it would have been even better with a bit of extra ginger, but as it was: fine. Pefectly credible. Nothing that would make my mother think that I was a thoughtless slacker who pulled off Mother's Day dinner with only slightly more effort than it would have taken to order a pizza.
Posted by Nic at May 15, 2006 08:18 PM | TrackBack