I have made fire!

Or...erm...casserole, but the feeling was similar.

Tonight, I attempted to act like an adult, by which I mean I actually decided to prepare a dish whose directions did not include "add boiling water and stir." I went on Cooking Light's website (thanks again, Rosanna!), printed a recipe for a broccoli-rice casserole, made a shopping list, and went to Tesco at a time other than ten minutes before I wanted to eat. I made substitutions (cream of chicken for cream of mushroom), added ingredients (Tesco had pre-cooked chicken, but no water chestnuts...curse them), made conversions (just how much of my 500g box of uncooked rice will constitute a cup, anyway, and how much of a 250g block of cheese is 4 oz? Also, where's the danged F-C calculator site again...), and managed not to set anything on fire. The dish made it out of the oven without landing on the floor. More remarkably, the casserole was actually palatable. (Let's see if it still is by the time I finish it, say Wednesday or so.) It resembled what it was supposed to resemble - a bunch of melted cheese mixed with soupy rice atop a bed of broccoli and chicken.

(Yes, disbelieving family, it worked. It was not nearly as visually unappealing as my rice stuffing, the picture of which you can take off the fridge any time now, nor did it turn out to have a weird consistency, unlike the result of Jen's and my unrelated oatmeal cookie incidents. You remember the cookies with that lovely nickname...)