Enchilada, Better, Faster, Stronger

I have talked in previous posts about the mid-life crisis mentality I have regarding cooking. As such, it seems only fitting that I've neglected this blog of late; not necessarily for bigger and brighter things, or even for the metaphorical office temp of Facebook (nice bit of catachresis for you English fans there), but just out of general malaise, a lingering desire that perhaps, perhaps I'm never going to get any better at this cooking lark after all. Perhaps all that's left is the heart-attack of Domino's Pizza (or the heartburn at any rate), and the grave. But no! Like Tennyson's 'Ulysses', I must be content 'to seek, to strive, to find, and not to yield'. At any rate, I have been cooking. Sort of.

Last week, I made enchiladas. Well, I say 'made'. I bought one of those kits which are actually a bit of a swizz, as they're basically just tomato puree and cardboard. Nonetheless, it actually seemed to go reasonably OK. As usual, we were using Quorn for non food-poisoning/vegetarian reasons. All you do is fry the Quorn, chuck some sauce and cheese over it, then put it in an oven dish in tortillas like a sort of fancy lasagne and put it in the oven:

 I should mention at this interval that we don't have an oven. Oh, eagle-eyed reader, I know that I said that we DID, because in many ways we do; but what I hadn't realised is that the oven in our kitchen is in fact IMPOSSIBLE TO USE. That's not due to my incompetence (no, really!), but due to the fact that the college have helpfully built the kitchen-cabinetting in front of the oven-lead, trapping the lead and meaning that the oven is functionally useless. It is a placebo. I weep, I mourn. So, anyway, we had to invade someone else's kitchen to make this. His room-mates kept coming in, looking sadly at the desolation, and then leaving quietly.

But, as you can see from this picture, the tortillas weren't actually that bad. They were pretty fiery, due to Emma doing the HAND OF GOD over the pan with the spice packet, and also they had onions in and none of us like onions, but apart from that, they were reasonably tasty. I don't know how I feel about this. I don't know how I feel about anything any more. I'M SO CONFUSED.

Tastiness - 6/10 - Too spicy. But otherwise OK. Emma says that I should say that NOBODY ELSE FOUND THEM TOO SPICY. Well, they were my enchiladas, Emma. MINE.

Likeliness to set off a fire alarm -6/10 - Frying and the use of an oven took place! Thankfully,  we were supervised by Andy and his husband...

Likeliness to cause a fatal coronary, 20 years down the line - 5/10 - Quite a lot of cheese going on there.