On Thursday night last week I drove to Omaha to pick up Kim from the airport. Kim and I worked with the Navigators on EDGE Corps staff at the University of New Mexico last year. We lived together, worked together, ran together, laughed together, cooked meals together, cried together, and most of all, we worked to inflluence the lives of college students together. It’s incredible to look back, and remember all the crazy, hilarious, and rewarding things that happened! EDGE Corps is a 1-2 year program, and I decided to be finished after one year, but Kim went back this year for her 2nd year. We hadn’t seen each other since the end of May, so this was a weekend we had both been looking forward to for weeks!!
On the way home from the airport, I gave Kim a cookbook and told her to pick out a couple recipes for dinner. I knew her picks would be exciting because Kim is a Registered Dietition and loves to cook healthy things! She chose a couple recipes that sounded delicious – Squash soup and meatballs. An easy, no-fail meal, right?!! Well…we ran into our first dilemna when HyVee was out of sprouts. It was quite humorous because the guy we asked had to call the produce department and he obviously had never seen/eaten any type of sprouts because he looked totally uncomfortable and awkward even saying that word! Ha! So, we decide the soup will be just fine without sprouts.
Our second dilemna happened when we realized that neither of us had ever cooked a squash before, and we had NO IDEA how to do it!! I looked it up on the internet, and the best way to do it is to put it in a big dish of water and cook it on the stove. Well…it was obvious that it would take WAY too long doing it that way…so we opted for the microwave. What a hilarious sight, because we put it in a 3-inch deep dish and only half the squash was even in the water! I was convinved it wouldn’t work, but after about 10 minutes, it was pretty wrinkled and squishy. Next we had to cook all the soup ingredients on the stove. No problem, we got that part! Until we had to next blend this cooked, hot, runny mixture in the blender. Uh, oh, right?! You can probably imagine what happened…it was a bit disastrous and HOT when it spewed from the top of the blender because it was filled way too full! =)
No major catastrophe in the meatball making…but when we pulled them out of the oven, they were super hard and dry!
The soup tasted like chicken noodle rather than squash, and the meatballs tasted like sand (so much for our being healthy by using whole wheat flour!!). Here is the final product:
The one part of the meal that turned out SPEC-tacular? The grapes! Yes, the one thing we didn’t create! These grapes were unreal! Kim put the first one in her mouth and exclaimed, “WHOA it’s like an explosion in my mouth!!” and then when she picked up her 2nd one, she said, “These things are literally the size of mini basketballs!” Hahahaha! So great!
So, that was Kim and I’s first adventure during our weekend in Iowa together. Don’t worry, there will be more stories and photos to come!
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