A side effect of working on my thesis day and night is that I’ve been thinking about my mother an awful lot lately. She made a delicious dinner called lasagna soup once and for some reason I found myself craving it, so I looked online until I found a recipe that seemed like the one she used and headed to Kroger for my ingredients. First miss: I couldn’t find mafala, which are little mini-lasagna noodles, so I grabbed rotini instead. (Someone once told me I reminded him of a curly noodle — I took it as a compliment, because, really, how else are you supposed to take that?) Second miss: The Husband insisted I leave out the can of diced tomatoes suggested in the recipe because I don’t like their texture.

The soup is fairly basic — it’s pretty much lasagna with too much tomato sauce and no ricotta cheese. I diced some garlic and onions with our ground turkey, threw some Spatini and varied Italian spices into a pot of tomato paste and water, then combined the whole shebang with the rotini noodles. It was looking pretty good until I realized I forgot the garlic bread, so I left the soup to simmer while I took care of that … and wound up with this:

Definitely not soup.

I guess maybe I simmered it too long or the missing tomatoes were an integral component whose absence destroyed the dish, and I wound up with rotini and tomato sauce. It wasn’t so bad, really — in fact, I’ve nearly finished the leftovers single-handedly — but it was disappointing in that it turned out nothing like the soup my mother used to make. But then again, I’m firmly convinced she was some sort of magic.

Speaking of magic, I knocked my thesis advisor’s chocolate-chocolate birthday cupcakes out of the park:

He ate two of them during our 20-minute meeting on Thursday. Now my index cards have chocolate fingerprints on them.

No one here is surprised to know that Kroger is my favorite place to be, but after perusing my recent transactions I realized that I go to the grocery store multiple times per week — sometimes per day — and that is just ridiculous. Our fridge, freezer, and cabinets are stocked with all sorts of things either half-used or never opened, so I challenged myself to come up with something using what I had on hand. Like a good little researcher, I made a list first:

So many leftovers, so many possibilities.

Then, I decided to check out the CrockPot recipe book to see if anything stood out, and found a recipe for Spanish rice. Perfect! I could use the ground turkey instead of ground beef, peas and carrots (I forgot to write those down) instead of green peppers, and some fancy-shmancy tomato soup we had on hand instead of tomato sauce. I got to work cooking the turkey — we have tons of it after a $.99 sale at Kroger — and dicing onions and garlic, when this little gem caught my eye:

Garlic sprout!

So I asked The Husband to plant it in a pot of dirt to see what happens, then returned to chopping up carrots and throwing fistfuls of peas into the CrockPot to give my Spanish rice some color. A blop of Worchestershire sauce here, a shake of cayenne pepper there, and it was ready to go! I let it simmer in the CrockPot until “The Amazing Race,” when we decided to pop off the lid.

Bat barf!

People, it was gross. It looked gross and it smelled gross, so I reached for a dish of oatmeal instead. But The Husband, brave and true, let me scoop some onto his plate.

Plating is not my strong suit. Those are tortilla chips, which I hoped would make the dog vomit Spanish rice go down easier.

After dousing it with sour cream and salsa, The Husband pronounced it NABNT — not awesome but not terrible. I think his tastebuds must have gone into hiding when they saw what he was trying to shovel into his mouth. We both agreed that real tomato sauce instead of the fancy soup I used would have made a world of difference, but I don’t know for sure how bad it was because I couldn’t bring myself to taste it. I dared myself to try some while transferring it to Tupperware, then chickened out. I guess they can’t all be winners.

I’m watching Guy Fieri bop around the stage on “Ultimate Recipe Showdown” now, hoping to get some inspiration for next week. It doesn’t have to be fancy, gourmet, or even impressive. At this point, I’ll settle for palatable and call it a win.

The Husband is, as we speak, chopping basil and pine nuts into tiny little pieces for some homemade pesto, having announced upon our return from our afternoon out that I was to relax on the couch while he took care of dinner. Not being one to argue with such direction, I am nestled in the cushions, fresh burgundy polish on my toes and a rerun of “America’s Next Top Model” on television. I took a long walk this morning — it’s flirting with 70 degrees outside in southcentral Kentucky — and we spent the afternoon shopping, going to lunch and going to the movies, so not a bad day overall.

Anyway, last week was bitterly cold, so I stopped by Kroger one night to pick up some white beans and commenced making ham and bean soup. After a quick bean soak (as opposed to overnight soak), the hambones went into the pot for 90 minutes of stewing, followed by another half-hour of simmering after I added more ham, some onions, and some garlic. Several twists of fresh-ground pepper later, and voila!

Hambone solo!

I froze the leftovers in a gallon bag for when Jack Frost decides to return to the area and went about my merry way. That’s not very dumbass of me, so here’s a picture of our new olive oil dispenser — as I tried to fill it earlier tonight, I spilled olive oil all over the kitchen. If you’ve ever had to clean up olive oil, you know the futility of it.

Artfully posed in front of the coffeemaker … which is artfully draped with a towel.

And finally, here is the result of all The Husband’s hard work:

Delicious!

It had to happen, you know: a Sunday snuck up on me and I was left without a shred of inspiration for Dumbass Gourmet. Earlier I thought I would make ham and bean soup, but today I awoke to find that not only was southcentral Kentucky positively balmy, I had absolutely zero gumption to make anything, much less ham and bean soup. So I toyed around with coupons and recipes for a while, took a walk with a friend, and finally slouched over to Kroger to see what I could see with the aim of not letting my legions of fans (all five of you) down.

I’m sorry, but this is all I could come up with:

I can’t call it seven-layer dip because it only has six: refried beans, ground turkey, black beans, taco sauce, sour cream, and cheese. Well, there’s two layers of cheese, so maybe it IS seven-layer dip. Whatever.

It’s wholly uninspired and looks a bit like dog barf, but it was actually pretty good with a bag of Tostitos. We didn’t watch the Super Bowl — we’re rebels that way, I guess — but the dip went nicely with the Food Network wedding cake show that was on.

Thanks for sticking with me! I’ll try to rally my culinary brain cells next week to make up for this disappointment.