Don’t go in my kitchen.

Seriously. It’s gross in there, like a cesspool of tomato sauce and salmonella. It’s been a busy couple days, so I thought I would take advantage of an afternoon off to make another of my mother’s fabulous recipes: porcupine balls. They’re basically meatballs with rice in them (which, in a world not populated by a dumbass cook, sticks out like porcupine quills) served in tomato sauce, so I assumed it would be a quick and easy dinner that I could throw in the Crockpot for a while and go watch Judge Judy.

Allow me a second here to laugh at my naïveté. Nothing ever goes as planned in the world of the Dumbass Gourmet, and this dinner was no exception. I started with a bowl full of ground turkey, which I figured would be a good substitute for ground beef. I added in the rice, some diced onions and garlic, milk, an egg, and italian seasoning, then set about making breadcrumbs because we were out of the handy kind that come in a canister. The Husband recently bought a nifty little food processor that I’ve avoided for fear of slicing my finger off, but I screwed up my courage, ripped up a piece of bread and carefully fed it into the grindy-place. Aside from a faint burning smell, the processor worked really well … except when I tried to dislodge the blade. I struggled with it for a moment, then finally wrenched it free and in the process flung bread crumbs all over the counter.

In the meantime, tomato sauce mixed with Spatini and sugar had been warming in the Crockpot, so I mixed up the meatballs and began to carefully dunk them in the sauce. I got about six of them in there before the thing threatened to overflow, so I dug around with a spoon and began to bail out some of the liquid, while at the same time managing to mash up most of the meatballs. I looked at the Crockpot and at the bowl that contained the rest of my meatball ingredients and sighed the sigh of a person who would really, really like a beer right now.

It was then I realized we were out of Yuengling. *horror movie scream*

Aggravated, hungry, and covered with bits of ground turkey, I dumped the contents of the Crockpot into a pot on the stove, mushed the remaining ground turkey into vaguely meatball-like shapes, slammed a lid on top of the whole business, and ignored it for an hour or so. Turns out, that’s exactly what you’re supposed to do:

These are actually separate meatballs even though they look like one great big lump of mush.

There was a bright spot in my frustrating dinner preparation: When I was looking over the garlic bread box I noticed the fine people at Pepperidge Farm have decided their garlic and cheese bread “takes meals to a whole new level.” I figure that, since my cooking is below average and this garlic bread is apparently above average, dinner works out to be just about edible. Thanks, garlic bread people!

When I was small and not feeling well, my mother would make either chicken corn soup or what I came to call “sick soup,” which was basically rice with a bouillon cube and too much water. I’ve been sick these past few days, so when I staggered in the door bruised and breathless from roller derby practice tonight I reached for the Herb-Ox and rice. It’s amazing how much comfort a bowl of such a simple soup can bring. It tasted better when my mother made it, but, then again, everything did.

White soup in a white bowl on a white counter. Possibly the most boring picture ever.

It’s been seven years this month since my mother died. She taught me how to cook, so I’d like to spend October making the same dinners she used to make for my family. None of her recipes were overly complicated, but she knew how to take something plain and make it delicious … and she was, unlike her daughter, definitely not a dumbass. I think I remember a grand total of two times that something she made had to be thrown out because it was inedible — once because I stuck a thermometer into a pot of potato soup and it burst (in my defense, my brother told me it was a good way to fake a fever) and once because she opened the wrong side of the pepper tin and dumped half of it on the mashed potatoes.

Here’s what I have so far: chicken corn soup, porcupine balls, macaroni and cheese, and that fluffy Jell-O salad she always took to family reunions. Family members, please chime in with your suggestions and I’ll get to cooking!