So, I wasn’t (too) worried about Charlie not liking the soup, since I knew he would likely eat it anyway (whether out of kindness or hunger or some combination of the two). Still, in a non-feminist way, I wanted to cook a nice meal for my guy while he was in town. There’s a part of me that (sometimes) wants to wear an apron and have a meal ready for him when he gets home. It’s not that he can’t cook for himself or that he expects me to cook for him. But there’s something primal about the ability to provide nourishment to someone you love. At the very least, I’d like to keep him alive.

The recipe was simple: sweet potatoes, apples, carrots, red lentils, and a lot of spices. To my dismay, there were no pre-chopped sweet potatoes, so I picked two of the odd-looking vegetables at random. Back at home, with Charlie waiting patiently on the couch, I started chopping. (A side note: I have a couch in my kitchen. It’s one of the best decisions my roommates and I have ever made, and makes our kitchen the homiest room in the apartment.) After an embarrassingly short amount of time, my arm CRAMPED UP. It wasn’t just tired, my arm just straight up stopped trying.

I thought the combination of vegetables was a little odd, but cooking them in a little bit of butter erased all doubts. I poured in the vegetable broth, pilfered added the necessary spices, and let mix simmer.

Half an hour later, I started pouring the soup into the blender in batches. I know that a food processor is supposed to be better, but I think the blender is superior. I end up with a much better texture in the blender. After all was blended to a creamy broth, I added a little water and let the soup cook for a little while longer.

The ridiculous thing was, I was nervous. This was an easy meal and I’ve been dating Charlie since before we could legally drink. I set the table, placing the silverware just so and setting out crackers. Even though the recipe was easy, I was afraid that it would be inedible like the butternut squash soup. There were so many different spices that the danger for nasty taste was also a real possibility. After a few more minutes of simmering, I added dollops of plain yogurt and set the bowls on the table.

I pretended not to care while I watched Charlie take a spoonful. “It’s good,” he said, “really good.” I won’t lie, I was sort of hoping for tears of joy or something similar. But I took a spoonful, and he was right. It was really good.

The next day, we went out for a very expensive Japanese dinner at the restaurant owned by Ming Tsai of Food Network fame, and I had the sweet potato soup as an appetizer. Charlie tried it and shrugged. “Honestly,” he said, “your soup was better.”

As it turns out, he can still make me blush.

I stumbled across this recipe from a blog by Stephanie O’Dea, who made a New Year’s resolution back in 2008 to use her slow cooker every day. I ended up choosing a potato soup topped with bacon. I’m of the opinion that bacon makes anything better. When I was apartment-hunting, I met a girl who called bacon the candy of meats, and now that’s become a term my family uses regularly.

I used to make a potato carrot cheese soup, but it takes me about 4 hours and much more counter space than I have in my current apartment. It will take weeks for me to muster the energy for that soup. This soup, however, was easy. The trouble with using my slow-cooker is that I have to get up early and at least put the ingredients in. Getting up early to do that means I couldn’t go to the gym in the morning, because there’s no way I was going to wake up even earlier. So the plan was to go to the gym after work. But, I worried that by the time I got home the stuff in the slow-cooker would have been overcooked into mush or somehow have caught on fire and burned the house down.

Then I decided to stop being an idiot and set my alarm, and go to the gym another day. The recipe was simple—diced potatoes, minced garlic, salt, pepper, chili seasoning, and then add cream cheese after the rest was done cooking. (It was supposed to have an onion, but I no longer trust the internet on the subject of onions and decided to leave it out.) When my alarm went off in the morning, I jumped up, ready to feel all domestic. Half an hour was more than enough time to chop up some potatoes and garlic, right?

WRONG. In my excitement I’d forgotten a crucial step—washing and peeling the potatoes. Well, “forgotten” isn’t the right word. I’d just forgotten how long that can take. A half-asleep perfectionist trying to peel and dice potatoes in the morning is a terrible, terrible idea. I was even trying to dice them in a fancy way, after all the peeling, by cutting four edges off the potato to make it a square, then cutting long strips (but holding them together), flipping the potato two more times and cutting. This is a super fast way of dicing, but it’s also dangerous. At one point I was cutting lazily, probably falling back asleep, when I felt a hard nub with my knife. What’s that? I thought. And then OH MY GOD I realized it was my finger (thankfully, before I kept cutting). I hear real cooks talking about knife skills, and even though it always sounds a little homicidal to me, I’m thinking maybe it’s something I should look into.

I rushed through the rest of the preparation, tossing in salt and pepper and chili paste in sort-of measurements. I should mention that I was halving the recipe, since it was meant for a 6-quart slow cooker, and mine is only 4 quarts. I was rereading the recipe once everything was in the slow cooker, making sure I hadn’t forgotten anything, and I realized that I hadn’t actually halved the pepper. But, it’s just a flavoring, right? It would be fine. I put the lid on, turned it on low, and left only 10 minutes late—the pepper was a worthy price to pay for not being super late.

I wasn’t able to leave work until almost 6, so I worried and worried that I was going to come home to a host of fire trucks. But when I got there, the potatoes looked perfect and it smelled peppery and delicious. I mashed up the potatoes so the soup was smooth, and added in the cream cheese. I used Neufchâtel cheese instead of cream cheese to reduce the fat content a little bit. But then, I cooked up some bacon to crumble on top, totally negating any worries about fat and worries about whether the soup would be tasty or not.

It took longer than I expected for the cheese to melt, and for a little while it looked like I’d be eating potato and cream-cheese chunk soup. (The recipe says I should’ve crumbled the cheese in, but how the hell do you crumble cream cheese?) Eventually, it was smooth and mixed, and I poured a bowl for myself, bacon included.

Pepper, as it turns out, is not a spice to fuck around with. It was spicy. I rather liked it, but any more pepper and it probably would have been inedible. However, I’ll be eating bacon for days, and that can only mean good things.

Since I wasn’t sure that I would like the squash by itself, I looked for a soup recipe. With some trepidation, I chose a recipe for roasted butternut squash and shallot soup that reviewers said turned out creamy without having to use any cream. There was a lot to be wary of. 1) Shallots. I had a sneaking fear that they were onions, but having never really seen one, I had no idea. I read some reviews that they were sweeter than onions, so I decided to brave them. They’d end up pureed, anyway. 2) Ginger. I’d seen my mother cook with ginger before, but I had no idea how to handle it. 3) The squash itself. The recipe called for peeling, cubing, and roasting it. I had no idea how I was going to accomplish any of those three things.

One night, I got out a pen and paper for my grocery list, and started Googling. How to peel squash, how to peel ginger, how to roast squash, exactly how much squash is 4 cups, etc. etc. The volume of tabs I had open on my browser made me anxious. My courage failed me, and I ended up with Froot Loops for dinner.

A few days later, I decided to really tackle it, after reading all my tabs and coming up with a game plan. I didn’t want to spend too long on the recipe, since roasting the squash alone took almost an hour. A few of the reviews on the recipe recommended cutting the squash in half without peeling it, and placing the chopped shallots and ginger in the cavity. I decided I was going to do that, to avoid having to peel the squash until it was roasted and would slide out of its skin easily.

I went to the grocery store to get everything, and realized I’d forgotten to Google one thing: shallots. I still had no idea what they were, and there was no way I was going to ask the staff. I didn’t want to embarrass myself, and the last time I asked someone there about a (not very) obscure ingredient (baby corn), the man raised his eyebrows and said, “Like… uh… baby food?” So I decided to wander around the produce section looking for signs.

Thankfully, they were on the end of one of the stands, and they sure looked a lot like onions. I decided on the spot to halve the number of shallots and add a little garlic instead, since I’d read in my research that shallots go well with garlic. Back in my house, I started the task of cutting and gutting the squash. After wrestling the knife through, I was glad I hadn’t decided to cube it. It would have taken me hours.

Then, I prepared the ginger and the shallots just like I’d seen on the internet. After that, I sliced some garlic and added everything to the squash cavities. Both halves went into a roasting pan. I set the timer for 50 minutes, and waited.

After a while, the kitchen smelled like heaven. When the 50 minutes was up, I pulled the squash out of the stove. I let it cool for a bit, then used a spoon to scrape the squash out of its skin. I had some misgivings that it wasn’t cooked quite enough, because it wasn’t as squishy as I thought it should be. But I figured it was all going into the blender, so I didn’t worry too much about it. All I had to do was add half of the squash mixture into the blender with chicken broth, blend, pour into a saucepan, then repeat. I started working, adding just a touch of olive oil each time (the recipe had called for it to be tossed with the cubed squash, so I wanted some for flavor).

When I was done blending, it didn’t look right. It managed to be very watery, while also looking grainy. It didn’t look anything like the picture on the recipe. I returned it to the blender, and blended more. That helped, but not much. I cooked the mixture on the stovetop for a little longer, hoping it would thicken up. I knew I could’ve added flour or even a little half and half, but there was another problem when I took a bite: it tasted like onions. All you “shallots aren’t like onions” people LIED. And I trusted you. And because the soup was grainy, I had the pleasure of crunching down on those slimy, crunchy shallots.

I ate it anyway. I didn’t want to be wasteful. I ate it with far too many crackers, to try and override the taste and texture. I’m not quite sure what went wrong, although I think it may be that the squash needed to roast longer, since it wasn’t cubed. Next time, I might go the lazy route and buy pre-cubed squash at the grocery store. And avoid shallots at all costs.

A week later, I threw the rest out, and bought this at the store. Two minutes in the microwave? I consider that a victory. And, I now know that I do like butternut squash.

Readers, is there anything you’d like me to attempt to cook? It could go well or it could go horribly. IT’S UP TO YOU.

For someone like me who is often lazy and often hungry, soup is the perfect winter meal. The initial batch can be time-consuming, but for the rest of the week, dinner is only a microwave trip away. The newest entry into my soup repertoire is a White Bean puree with a poached egg on top. I got this recipe from the blog Not Eating Out in New York, a food blog by a woman named Cathy who decided to forego eating out for two years and learned about cooking. She’s since become very advanced, and many of her recipes use scary-looking ingredients that I’ve never heard of.

Cathy is also a big supporter of eating local, so she shops in New York markets for all of her dishes and uses fruits and vegetables that change with the seasons. Great for the environment, not so great for someone like me who is usually unwilling to trek to the market when I have a Shaw’s practically across the street. I tend to get many of my recipes from Kraftfoods.com, which has a handy tool where you can select some ingredients that you have on hand, and it will find recipes using those ingredients and other things you’re likely to have in your fridge or pantry, not some obscure leafy legume, or something. I try to buy things I know I can use in multiple recipes (unlike the poor red pepper I have sitting in my crisper waiting for me to get brave enough to make homemade roasted red pepper hummus before it goes bad).

As a result, Cathy’s recipes are often too ambitious for my humble skills, but this White Bean soup used simple ingredients: any kind of white bean, fresh garlic, salt, pepper, and an egg. Eat it with a few Ritz crackers for a little more salt and a bit of butter taste, and you have a filling winter soup. Before making this recipe, you could not have forced me to eat a poached egg. I have an 8-year-old cousin who calls eggs over easy “juicy eggs,” and that disgusting description is exactly how I felt about liquid egg yolk. As in, there is no way it could be properly cooked, and why would I want to eat egg juice when I could have fine, fluffy scrambled eggs? But the egg in the picture on the blog looked as good as sunshine, and I was willing to try.

One thing her recipe neglects to say is exactly what to do with the beans beforehand. I was glad I thought to read the package, because the beans need to be rinsed (which I never would have thought about), then soaked overnight. When I rinsed the beans in a colander, I pulled out a rock and was never so grateful to have read directions (especially because I have yet to find a dentist in Boston). The package is very unclear about how long you’re supposed to cook the beans after having soaked them overnight. Two and a half hours seemed excessive after being in water for 12 hours. I decided to wing it and tasted a bean every ten minutes or so, forgetting that the water was boiling and burning my tongue each time in my eagerness. They were ready in half an hour.

While soaking the beans, you sauté a clove or two of fresh garlic, and then all goes into the blender. I have only made this recipe 3 or 4 times, so I don’t have my pan usage down to a science yet (for example, when I’m done cooking my tortilla soup, I know how to time it so that the kitchen is clean and all that’s left is the one pan the soup is simmering in).

You need a separate pan to sauté the garlic, and another to poach the egg, and several others for the process of pureeing the beans in the blender (if you are poor like me and don’t have a food processor). I cook the entire bag of beans, so they all won’t fit in the blender and I have to do this back and forth dance and manage to dirty at least 4 pots. This time, I was making the soup and my roommate came home, looked at the mess of dishes, and thought I was making something really fancy. Another plus to soup—it makes you look really busy. However, I messed up the water-to-bean ratio and the soup was much chunkier than a puree should be. My roommate dipped her spoon in the pan to try it despite my warning about the texture. And in a perfect Goldilocks ending, she said it was just right.

After poaching the egg and cracking it on top of the soup, I decided that eggs are magical—the yellow yolk makes the soup a little creamier and covers any garlic/water/bean imbalances. And now, for the rest of the week while temperatures continue to drop, I’m just a 4-minute poached egg away from dinner.

Postscript: I’m a little worried that egg yolks are going to be my gateway drug to slimier foods…