I have had zero positive experiences with cooking dairy at school. This isn’t to say that I dislike dairy or that I can’t make food involving it—I eat cereal with milk and out cheese in sandwiches. Sometimes I even just eat slices of cheese straight out of the package like the absolute barbarian I am. It’s just that any time I try to use milk in conjunction with heat, unspeakable horrors occur. My most successful lactiferous endeavor has been with macaroni and cheese, and that’s stretching it. Normally I would explain how to make the food in question here but anybody who doesn’t know how to make mac and cheese from a box probably shouldn’t be allowed to cook in the first place so I’ll just cut to the chase and say that the cheese somehow always ends up splattered over both the microwave and my shirt, which you’d think would be mutually exclusive. Ultimately it was still edible though. The real issue I have is the quesadilla.
The quesadilla is another food that my family can all prepare better than me, but normally I get around it by rebranding it as a “quasi-dilla” because my love of terrible puns is far greater than my self loathing at not being able to master basic life skills. I can make pretty good quasi-dillas normally, too—it’s a simple process. Just oil the pan, put the cheese on top of the tortilla, fry until the cheese is melted, then fold it in half and eat. (You can throw little bacon in there while it’s cooking for extra flavor and an increased chance of rectal cancer later in life.) at least that’s how it works anywhere either than in my room. When I try it in my room it takes so long for the cheese to melt that the entire tortilla has invariably shriveled into an inedible black crisp. I have no idea what variable causes this as I can’t reproduce any other result.
A similar problem occurs with grilled cheese. I either butter the bread before putting it on the pan and the same thing happens as with the quasi-dilla, or I don’t and the bread becomes burnt on the outside and raw on the inside which is actually worse. Yes, I tasted it. No, I don’t know why. I think the problem might have something to do with my stove, it has no numbers for the temperature settings and food always seems to take longer to cook than the receipt says it should. At the same time, I’m not sure why cheese is such a problem, considering most of the other food I cook on the stove turns out all right. The microwave problem I can understand; every single time I put a liquid in there it acts like a volcano on viagra. But the stove just seems to have it out for cheese specifically. It would be really annoying if there wasn’t a pizza place right down the block. Ahhh, New York.
Some people classify eggs as dairy, but those people are crazy. It doesn’t even come from a cow. Eggs will be covered in the meat section. Except I already wrote the meat section, so I guess anybody who wanted egg stories is shit out of luck.
By: Alexander Rose
Alexander Rose studies satire at NYU Gallatin and wishes he was actually just Oscar Wilde. He is interested in writing, roleplaying games, and procrastination. Describing himself in the third person like this makes him feel weird.
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