The Lunch Exchange

I have a friend who works in the building directly across the street from my office.  This has been going on for over 1.5 years now, and in that time, we have gone out to lunch a lot. A lot. 

After doing something of a cost analysis, we determined that we were wasting an extraordinarily large amount of money on lunches in restaurants during the week. Neither of us were especially motivated to cook for ourselves when we had a perfectly good lunching buddy so close. 

About six weeks ago we decided to put a new plan into action: The Great Lunch Exchange. This is a project wherein each of us cooks something Sunday night and divides it into four Tupperware containers. On Monday afternoons at 12:00, we meet mysteriously on a street corner and trade TWO of our four containers for two containers of DIFFERENT FOOD.  In this way we have four low cost meals for the week, and then pick one day to go out. GENIUS.

Except, of course, I am a disaster at cooking.  

One recent Sunday I decided to make a broccoli cheddar quiche. I bought the cheddar, I bought the broccoli, I bought premade frozen pie crusts, and got ready to bake my quiche on Sunday night. 

Immediately I hit a major disaster in that upon reading the box with the pre-made frozen pie crusts, it informed me I needed to defrost the crusts for 24 hours. I decided that was ridiculous. I needed to make my quiche NOW. 

"I will microwave these crusts!" I said, pleased with myself for coming up with a brilliant quick defrosting idea.

"DO NOT MICROWAVE CRUSTS!" responded the package, in very large unmistakable letters.

"Then...I...will....hold the package over my space heater for twenty minutes!" I said.

"No one has ever thought of doing something quite that stupid before," said the package. "Clearly we will have to revise our warning label."

I took the box of pie crusts and held it over my space heater for 20 minutes. 

This was less effective than you may have imagined.  I tried rolling the pie crust over my pie baking pan. It immediately fell to pieces. Instead of going out and getting a new pie crust, I chose to cobble all the pieces together at the bottom of the pan, painstakingly putting tiny bits together like puzzle pieces.  When I was out of pieces, I looked at the bottom of the pan through all the gaping holes of pie crust and said, "Screw it!"  And poured the quiche mixture in anyway.  

Knowing my propensity for burning things in ovens, I set the oven timer for 20 minutes and put the quiche in the oven.  I immediately walked away and went to my room in the opposite end of the house, shut the door, and turned on a movie. 

Forty minutes later I went downstairs for an ice cream bar and heard the beeping and wondered what it was. 

But only for a moment. 

I raced to the oven and pulled out my bubbling burning darkened quiche.  I decided to make another quiche. 

I started the entire process over again, space heater, puzzle pieces and all. 

Except this time when I put it in the oven and set the timer I set up a chair six feet away and sat in it staring intently at the oven until the beeper went off. 

It wasn't bad, actually. And if anyone has ideas for new recipes to cook for Sunday, that would be appreciated.