Back when my friend Amanda was a starving student in university, she invited me over for dinner. I think it was this time, but I can’t recall. What I can recall is I felt like a mannerless oaf, handling fork and knife like I had never used them before and I think food may have escaped from my mouth as I was likely talking with my mouth full (the fact that I have a substantial gap between my front teeth doesn’t help matters at all). Seriously, I’m not 100% sure why it sticks with me as the second worst dining experience of my life (from the point of view of how I behaved, I mean), but it does.

[The worst dining experience of course is the time I went out for coffee with Rich, Ves and Eli and burst into laughter over a clever quip, spraying all three of them with the café mocha that was in my mouth. And yes, they still call me (semi) friend today, a fact that boggles my mind. "Spit on me, lose me as a friend forever" is my personal motto. Theirs must be something like "Arrive on time for an event, lose us as friends forever" so I do my part and make sure I'm always tardy because I sort of like being their friend. They are, as you can imagine, eternally grateful to me.]

Now all of my friends are very gracious and hospitable, but I am faced with a crippling fear that if I invite them over for dinner, they will laugh forever if they ever have to eat my cooking because I’m not exactly a great cook. So, I chose Amanda as my guinea pig because she has fewer people to tell about my ineptitude, though I may be mistaken.

Previous attempts to cook Nigerian food (which I spent nearly 30 years in the vicinity of; you’d think I would have learned some of it by osmosis) has been dismal so far: not once have a put enough salt in anything. And sure, you can add salt after but does anyone else agree that food salted after the fact tastes different from food salted during the cooking process? Instead, I put too much pepper in everything. I’m not sure how that happens: a dash of chillies suddenly turns into a mess so offensive to my tongue that I could be eating pepper coated sawdust for all that I can taste.

I have a point: I invited Amanda for dinner and I didn’t kill her. Figuring out a menu almost killed me though. The main actors in “Operation: dinner for 2″ were chicken breast, corn on the cob and potatoes or rice or pasta. I solicited ideas on facebook as to what I should prepare and some darling folks came through with recipe ideas. “Chicken parmesan,” said Sheri, but when she mentioned pounding the chicken I paled (as much as I can given my Nigerian heritage) and decided it was too complex. Shannon suggested Shake and Bake and joking or not that is what I ended up making…shaking. She gave me a simple recipe for roasted potatoes too and yum! I’m in love. I hadn’t eaten potatoes in a good six months but I don’t intend to let the bag of ‘taters in my kitchen go to waste, especially since there are so many things I can toss on my potatoes before roasting them.

Everything turned out edible, though things took longer to cook than planned, and as you can imagine, the best part of the evening was the conversation that followed, not the food that was eaten.

So, who wants to come over for dinner?

Filed under: Friends by jummy