January 11, 2014 10:00 am

I’ve known how to cook for myself since I was in elementary school. However, I’ve seen both single and married women sorta mess up an egg scramble, and that totally blows my mind.

Therefore, I give you a few easy ways to prepare a darn good meal for when you feel like treating yourself to something tasty. Since I’m a single lady, I haven’t really needed to cook for anyone other than myself or for my small family during the holidays. Still, it feels great to be able to cook up a half decent meal that you can enjoy in the privacy of your own home so that you don’t have to change out of your loose pants just to hit up a diner.

I used some of my new favorite products to make the following dishes.

1. Pasta, Shrimp and Sadness Steak

In my home, we have drastically reduced our use of butter due to health reasons. We’ve substituted that with Olive Oil and have tried different brands to find which one has the smoothest taste. For this meal, I used Iberia brand Olive Oil.

A. The Pasta

When boiling the pasta, I added a splash of the olive oil to help prevent it from sticking to itself. After about 10 minutes, I removed it from the burner and drained the pasta to avoid overcooking it. You don’t want mushy pasta noodles.

B. The Steak

As you can tell by the photo, I overcooked the steak and it bummed me out. You wanna know why? Because I cooked with a bad attitude and you’re gonna learn that in the kitchen, if you’re in a bad mood, you’ll taste it in your food. My family was running late for Christmas dinner so when I reheated the meat, I went too far and ruined Christmas for everyone.

It’s actually not too difficult to prepare a good steak, but I’m still me and I can still burn one.. I tried making this one, a boneless beef steak, in a large pan with olive oil, garlic, and salt. I’m still working on perfecting the timing, so I owe you one.

C. The Shrimp

I made up for burning the steak by serving shrimp that wasn’t overcooked. I used the same olive oil in a frying pan and added some crushed garlic which I sautéed for a few seconds before laying the shrimp into the pan.

Shrimp is very easy to cook. I added olive oil to my pan along with some crushed garlic and waited for it to get hot before laying the shrimp down. The key thing is to pay attention to the color. Raw shrimp start off gray and turn pink as they cook. Let them sit for about 4 minutes then turn them so they cook evenly. But don’t overcook them or they’ll come up very dry.

To make spicy shrimp (camarones a la diabla), you don’t have to go through the complicated process of making your own spicy salsa from scratch. I cheat by adding several squirts of ketchup, hot sauce, and a splash of orange juice into the pan after I see that the shrimp are almost fully cooked. You mix them all together and allow the sauce to get hot enough to enjoy.

The pimento-stuffed olives were a nice way to sort of enhance the need for something salty and cool. I keep them in the fridge.

2. Easy Egg Scramble

Like I said, I’m amazed that anyone can mess up a good scrambled egg. Want to know what NOT to do?

A. Don’t crack the egg directly into the pan unless you’re specifically making a fried egg.

B. Don’t poke the egg so much while cooking it that it breaks apart into little bits of scrambled egg. It gets too dry and is not tasty.

Here’s what you SHOULD do:

A. Prepare your eggs by beating 1-2 of them in a bowl. Use a whisk or a fork depending on how much access you have to a Chef Ramsay-like kitchen.

B. Heat up your pan and use something that is as non-stick as possible. You can stink up a house super fast by letting egg burn on the sides of a pan, so avoid that. Again, I used olive oil to help coat my pan and to ensure that it would help distribute the heat a lot more quickly to help cook the egg.

C. Add your favorite chopped veggies and/or meats. I threw in a little spinach and some sliced sausage. Once you throw in a meat, you won’t need to add any salt to the egg.

The important thing to remember is to fold the egg as you cook it. Use a flat spatula so that you can get under the egg and fold it over. Do this several times so that the egg remains fluffy as it cooks and so you don’t break it apart and overcook it. My egg ended up looking like this:

And staying true to Mexican breakfast tradition, I heated up a corn tortilla to go with it. I also threw in some salsa so that the ghost of my grandmother wouldn’t come back to haunt me.

3. Love Chips? Make Them 100xs Better.

If you’re not in the mood to cook just yet, but you know you want something savory, I recommend you go this route. I don’t know what it is about adding lime and chile to foods that makes them so amazing. The combination of something citric and spicy should be making your mouth water right about now.

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