How to Screw Up Pasta Primavera

In an effort to not be the worst cook in the world, I decided that I needed to try making something simple, by-the-recipe, with no deviations.

After trying to go food shopping for a week's worth of meals, I realized that baby steps were the only way to go.  So I picked the easiest dish I could:

Pasta primavera.

Granted, it was extra-cheesy pasta primavera, but hey--what's a little extra cheese?

I love cheese.

Cheese can't screw up a meal, can it?

Oh yes, my friends.

Oh yes, it can.

This time around, the food shopping wasn't the issue.  Quite the opposite, in fact.

I got everything I needed--

Yellow onion.
Zucchini.
Eggplant.

The right kind of pasta.

I even bought the exact sort of pepper that was specified by none other than Martha Stewart herself, in my favorite cooking magazine "Everyday Food."

So what went wrong?

Well, seeing as how there were only about four steps in the recipe, I'd say something went wrong between steps one and two.

Or maybe before step one.

Maybe the biggest mistake was that I tried to actually cook something.

And I use the term "cooking" loosely because pasta primavera mainly involves throwing stuff into a pan.

Ohhh, but not if you want it "extra cheesy."

Then there's flour involved.  And milk.  And at one point, the recipe asks that you mix the milk, the flour, and the onions together.

How this creates anything resembling cheese is beyond me, but what it does create is a sort of pasty, onion dip with an off-brown coloring.

Once that little mixture was finished, I probably should have just given up, but I thought maybe adding the rest of the ingredients to it would solve the problem.

Maybe it would all just come together in the end.

Not the case.

Instead, it turned all the lovely vegetables and the perfectly cooked pasta (okay, well maybe not perfectly--edible, let's say the "edible" pasta) into something Dickensian orphans wouldn't have eaten.

But, being in the state of denial I was now entrenched in, I decided to give it a try anyway.

As dog food, it was spectacular.
As pasta primavera, it was dog food.

I had failed.

I tried putting it in the refrigerator, thinking maybe it would be better the next day.

Instead, I had a block of frozen mush with the occasional eggplant visible in it.

That same night, I went to the store, bought more olive oil, more butter, and a few more vegetables.

I went home.
I threw everything in a pan.
I added more butter.

And then I threw it on a plate.

It was fantastic.

It wasn't the fanciest dish you ever saw, and I definitely cheated by using an inexcusable amount of butter, but it tasted good.

And that was, in its own way, a victory.

Oh, and I added an entire layer of parmesan cheese.

Martha does it her way, I do it mine.