The value of paying attention

My not-so-hands-on self decided that I would like to try something new. Follow a recipe. I never follow recipes and I rarely try anything new. What can I say, I'm a creature of habit.

With that said, I would like to note that I can obviously read as well as follow directions, but, things happen sometimes and your mind wonders and you're tired from work and you have a 6 year old asking you what wood is made of and all you are trying to do is follow a recipe and decipher the difference between tbs. and tsp. (given all the aforementioned factors, it is no easy feat).

This is how it all started: I am reading my Cosmo on the bus on the way home when I come across what looks like a very simple to make yummy truffle treat, and I think to myself, I should treat my family to something yummy and I can actually have my son help out since he loves to help with everything, we can make a thing out of it right?

So, all I need is Oreos, cream cheese, chocolates chips, powered sugar and voila! Not so hard right? So, I make a stop at the store pick up all of the above, and I figure I'll figure out the proportions when I get home. Anyway, we get home and we start…

Now, here is the tricky part - the instructions are about 5 sentences long and I think oi-vey people need directions to make something so simple? dumb people. Then I begin to read.

… blah, blah, crush Oreos - ( 8 oz. so I figured half the box, since it's about a lb. ) - done
… add cream cheese - ( 4 oz, but it doesn't seem to want to mesh with the 8 ozes of crushed cookies ) - kinda done
… make balls, put on sheet, put in freezer for one hour - problem.
I notice that I have an enormous amount of goo that doesn't seem to look right, so I go back to the recipe: 8 Oreo cookies. That's right! 8 Oreo cookies, not 8 OUNCES of Oreo cookies! Big difference.

Ok, Problem averted - double the cream cheese - done
… make into balls put into freezer - done

Next step says to melt the chocolate in the microwave for 1 minute, OK, done, but then it says to stir and NUKE for 30 seconds. What the hell is nuke? ( So, l go to look it up online of course - definition: "to attack somebody or something with nuclear weapons", totally useless in this instance to me ) All the while my son demands to know what "Nuke it" means, because he's in charge of the chocolate.

So, we just melt the heck out of that sucker and begin to lather the "truffles" in it… we realize that we better hurry because it's hardening and well, the recipe doesn't say what to do when that happens. Given this, the last few looked less like a truffle and more like a puffer but, we didn't let that faze us.

So, once this step in complete, we finally move on to the last and final step, all the confusing and unnecessary language behind us. Until we learn that we have to put the powdered sugar in a "sieve" I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I have never heard of this word before. Mike suggests that we put it in a sleeve and that didn't seem to make sense either. So, we decided to use common sense and just dusted these things with that thing and stuck them in the freezer.

Mission accomplished! They were yummy btw. :)