Sandwiches. I have them all the time for lunch – either peanut butter or a cold grilled cheese. Every morning when my mom asks me what do I want for lunch, the quick response is a sandwich, which by now is becoming more and more hesitant as each day passes. By the time I get to school, my sandwich is flat and very unappealing or in some cases, the grilled cheese becomes cold by lunchtime. Having them for 4 months straight, with the occasional cold pasta or buying from school, I decided that I needed to try something else, or I would have to starve. The idea that came into mind was cooking.

Cooking isn’t a relatively new concept for me. All I need is a recipe and ingredients and I can whip up just about anything. So making something different for lunch shouldn’t have been a hard feat. The “main dish” didn’t need to be elaborate, but it did need to have flavor. It also shouldn’t take a long time to make. Plus, I feel bad that my mom has to wake up at an ungodly hour and make my dad and myself a lunch, as well as hers. So something simple was the thing I had to keep in mind.

So I made a trip to the library and got out a few Rachael Ray cook books and a few even ethnic ones too (I like learning about different cultures), because she is a renowned chef on the Food Network Channel. I sit at the dining room and flip through books, scouring over recipes and reading the ingredients carefully, making sure anything I wanted to make didn’t involve alcohol, weird ingredients I wouldn’t eat, or take an exorbitant amount of time to make.

I had no such luck. Most of her recipes required some sort of alcoholic beverage, while others required too many ingredients. Even though the recipes were all roughly 30 minutes, some being 15 minutes, it was still too time consuming and required lots of preparation, which I knew would make my mom insanely mad, especially at 5:45 in the morning. Most of the ethnic book recipes had really great dessert items, so I saved those for later, but they all required way too much time to make or made in servings of four, six, or eight.

One day I started reading the back of a pita bread package. The back, surprisingly, had multiple ways of eating the pita bread. I then decided to try one of the ways, because I was just so tired of sandwiches. It actually wasn’t that hard to make. The instructions were to just cut the pita bread in half so it was a pocket and then stuff it with whatever foods you wanted such as cheese, cold cuts, etc. I tried mine with grilled chicken, peppercorn Parmesan dressing, and lettuce. It tasted pretty good and it didn’t require too much time to make in the morning.

This was a somewhat new experience for me. I mean, I had to make my own lunch, which I never do. I usually just pack a few things with the usual, bland sandwich my mom makes for me. Instead of starving or suffering through lunch, I tried something new, and the best part was it tasted great. Cooking is a fun new experience that people should try because it’s satisfying to know that I made something that I like to eat. In the meantime, I’m going to try to make more foods and explore the wonderful world of cooking.