It’s fair to say that most of us, at some point in our lives, will have a low enough income that we have to scrape the bottom of our bank accounts to feed ourselves three meals a day. For most people that comes either during or directly after university.

I have handily discovered what I have been calling “kitchen ingenuity” in my moments where I realize I’ve forgotten to buy breakfast foods (or even lunch foods, though this is less common). I also know that not eating breakfast is not healthy and usually leads to headaches, and in some incidences, sickness and nearly passing out. Not healthy for someone who wants to work a steady schedule with very little health related interruptions.

So this morning, when I got up to realize that all full serving sizes of both my hot and cold cereal collection were all out and that I had forgotten to bring back my three serving size tupperwares of waffle mix from my parents house, I turned to the cupboard and thought, “Okay, now what’s for breakfast?” And I reorganized my food cupboard.

Wonders appear when this happens. A whole box of Jiffy’s corn muffin mix! (I also discovered Cook & Serve Chocolate Pudding, Ovaltine, and an unopened Peach Apple Sauce that’s good until July.) So I went about mixing and pouring, pre-heating the oven while turning on the electric kettle for tea. And when the oven beeped to inform me that it was at 400 degrees, I went to open it and slide in the muffins only to realize…

My roommate had put a whole tray of baked cupcakes in the oven and left them there.

Okay, so I’ve had one or two roommates in the past who left things in the oven. Usually cookie sheets. But never one who actually put food in the oven and left it in there. So I shall have to add yet another rule to my list. “Always check the oven before pre-heating.” Fortunately, I think the cupcakes are okay, so as soon as the oven was done with the muffins and cooled down, I slid them back in.

But realizing that corn muffins, even with butter, are rather plain. I had to unfortunately take this one step further. And in what shall be the third in a series of attempts to invent stuff using a food processor, I chucked butter, frozen strawberries, and a small bit of half and half in an attempt to make strawberry butter.

I should have stopped at muffins.

I can say at least this much. It made a mess, but it tasted good. (I couldn’t say nearly as much about the goat cheese puree. That one was a mistake from the beginning.) And the muffins (for all that I forgot to time them) came out marvelous. But from now on, if it involves the food processor, I think I better stick to the recipes and not whatever happens to be on hand that I think might go well.

You never know what goo is going to appear when you find it too much fun to crush and blend things in a food processor.

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