Who needs recipes?

...Says the girl who doesn't know how to cook. I've been known to mess up hard-boiled eggs (ended up with solid whites but runny yolks), tapioca (I've only tried to cook it twice, but both times I forgot sugar), and rice pudding (I added two cups of rice to the milk mixture... Unfortunately, the recipe called for two cups of COOKED rice...). I don't even try with REAL foods, like things with vegetables and stuff.

I may not be a great cook because I'm not that great at reading recipes. Thankfully, some genius (Betty Crocker?) invented boxed mixes to bake amazing brownies, cakes, and other sugary delights sans much creativity and kitchen knowledge. I like things that I can make in three steps (and sometimes I still forget to preheat the oven before I start mixing crap together).

Unfortunately, simplified recipes are not enough to save me from baking mishaps and experiments. Oftentimes I'm too simple to have various ingredients in my kitchen... Why should I have baking powder or vanilla extract if I can subsist just fine on cereal and rice? I find that if I look up dessert recipes in my cookbooks, I usually can't make them because I don't have enough of the elements; the result would just be too gross to try.

Nonetheless, there are just some times when I NEED to get some food out, whether I have all of the ingredients called for in the recipe or not.

For instance, tonight I just HAD to have brownies to go with my ice cream. However, I didn't have applesauce, which I always like to substitute for vegetable oil (it's become a habit... dang college roommates brainwashing me). So I hopped on the Internet to find out if I really needed the oil for brownies. Some people said yes while others insisted that it's mainly used to make for poofy, fluffy brownies. I figured, in that case, that it was probably okay to go without.

But I was afraid still. There must be SOMETHING else I could use to make up for the lost ingredient. I thought, "If I could use applesauce, maybe I could use some other mashed fruit." So I took a banana, crushed it, and mixed it with the brownie batter.

I baked it for the regular number of minutes. And I must say, it tasted pretty amazing. Even when there were chunks of banana remaining in the batter, it still was great.

This was not the first time I took on such a task. When I was a freshman in college, at the end of my first quarter, I decided that I wanted to bake cookies for my calculus professor, who tolerated my daily visits during office hours.

I pulled out the cookbook and flipped to my favorite recipe for sugar cookies. Easy, right?

I realized I didn't have eggs. And I'd just returned from the campus market with butter and flour and was pretty proud of myself... so I wasn't going to go back that day.

So I decided I'd make the cookies without the eggs. Strange as it sounds, they tasted great still. They were definitely denser than regular cookies, but my roommates agreed that they could hardly tell the difference. Perfect!

So the moral of this story is to not be afraid to experiment a little with cooking. My second mom had told me, anyway, the recipes are just guidelines, after all.