Scalloped Corn

Ah yes - the inevitable question: when one is cooking only for oneself, one tends to make very small quantities of food. However, one can scarcely ever make exactly the correct amount of food, and leftovers appear.

Dilemma: lunch needed

Available: leftovers and half an hour

Solution: Scalloped Corn

Abstract:

First, I called my sister. That is a good first step - thinking out loud, creative inspiration, the whole 27 feet - at my fingertips. I opened my small refrigerator to see what was available, knowing that a weekend of having time to cook meals meant the beginning of a week where I would not have to cook so much - but would have to get creative with leftovers. I had a dish of french cut beans left from a spaghetti dinner Saturday, along with half a cup of spaghetti noodles from that same encounter (somehow, between the 5 of us we hadn't managed to each take an extra bite ...?). Eyeing the beans, I thought of the cans of cream of mushroom soup sitting in my closet, and thoughts of green bean casserole tantalized me. However, a check in my cookbook was crushing confirmation that I did, indeed, need French onions, and that it would have to bake for 45 minutes, and that I would need a pan of a size I don't have ... simply put, the creative idea of deliciousness was completely out of reach.

So, I pushed the beans away, and looked more. Chicken soup and corn ... the idea of a vegetable in a sandwich-ruled diet was appealing, and considering the recent disappointment of the beans, I looked up corn in my cookbook - almost on a whim.

On page 581, I struck gold: Scalloped Corn. Marked as a favorite, it had the following drawbacks listed at the very top:

-Prep: 20 minutes
-Bake: 35 minutes
-Stand: 15 minutes
-Makes: 8 servings

None of these were viable options, and I nearly turned the page in despair ... but I scanned the list of ingredients anyway. Onion, green pepper, butter, corn, salt, egg, milk, cheese, and crackers.

Bang.

Half an onion left over from making spaghetti sauce Saturday? Check. Green pepper? In my ice-cube-sized freezer. Butter? Yes. Corn? The necessary leftover. Salt, egg, milk ... of course. Cheese? Still some left, usually used for sandwiches. Crackers? Ooh, crazy coincidence - feeling sick one of my last days at work and getting some unsalted saltines (go figure that one out ...); still unopened. Better yet, glancing at my desk I see two biscuits, remnants of the clan that emerged when I made chicken noodle soup earlier in the week. By now, they are hard as sandstone; a good substitute for crackers, and only edible under constrained circumstances. But if they were crumbled into something ...

Houston, we have a solution.

Battle plan:

Grabbing my skillet, I scan the recipe and decide that if this is kind of cooked up in a skillet, it should be a matter of minutes instead of baking in a pan for 45-odd minutes. Timing is a crucial facet to having a workable solution. Piling in the ingredients, I toss the noodles on top - at what other time will I eat half a cup of noodles? I grab a bowl and fork, wooden stirring spoon (one of my favorite, all-purpose utensils), hot pad, dish towel, and head off down the hallway. My sister, I hope, is entertained by my stream-of-consciousness rundown of my adventure.

I turn the electric stove burner on - still getting used to a flame that can't be turned off immediately. The big danger is the super-sensitive fire alarms of Lambein, my dorm. Smoke is a big no-no; even steam will sometimes set them off. Excesses even of wonderful smells like frying bacon or garlic must be treated with caution. Using the fork to scrape a little butter into the frying pan, I chop up some of the onion and green pepper, and toss it into the pan. Using the wooden spoon to stir it, I am faced with the necessity of draining the water off the corn.

It was at this point I realized a flaw in my plan: I had no colander. It was roughly about approximately that time I also realized that the dish in which my corn resided had a lid with holes in it. As an experiment, I turned the dish upside down. Voila - the water drained out the holes, and the corn stayed in the dish. I am now saving that dish for that express purpose.

Crumbling everything into the skillet (in considerably smaller proportions than those given in the recipe), I stirred it together. Simultaneously, I scraped a bit of butter onto the noodles, poured some milk on top, and heated them.

Result:

The egg cooked within minutes, and there were no other ingredients I was worried about being safe/cooking. When it set up a little, I scraped it into my bowl, put a little slice of cheese on top, and ate my noodles while waiting for the cheese to melt a bit on top. Having finished the noodles, I put down that bowl and turned to the concoction reposing on the counter. Cautiously, I took a small bite.

Wow. It was actually good. Way better than I had expected, actually. I had been thinking of eating leftovers, but this was something I would actually make again. Delicious.

Reflections: Chop up the green pepper more. And don't put so much milk on the noodles; the butter would have sufficed. Other than that - yay and yum.

Drawbacks:

Dishes - skillet, wooden spoon, two dishes, bowl, fork, sharp knife. Time - 14 minutes.

Positives:

Lunch, talking with my sister

Net Disaster = Zero