It's like making toast, apparently...

"Oh, I just threw it together." It's a phrase that I use with sketches, casseroles, baked goods, and (in the most recent case) Halloween costumes for work. With Kelly and his friends, it's for things that take me hours to make.

"Oh, I just threw it together," Kelly said the night he first cooked for me. This was in regards to risotto with spring vegetables and sausage. A meal that I would have to SLAVE over. It was perfect in that the grains were tender, the vegetables still retaining some crunch, and a wonderful sauce that accented the spice of the sausage. "[Blank], please," Samantha said the next day during our usual get-togethers to rehash the evening in HD detail. "You do not just throw that [blank] together."

But Kel isn't the only offender. "Oh, I just threw it together," Kelly's friend Tawny said as she welcomed us into the apartment she shared with their friend Mara. Her "it" ended up being cod hushpuppies, lobster tails in clarified butter, avocado salad, and some sort of bruschetta/pizza-esque item. I have never made lobster anything...let alone in clarified butter (which itself takes me a good 10 minutes to make sure that I don't burn it). And, of course, everything tasted as if it came out of the sea dressed in parsley with lemon juice dabbed behind the valves.

The funniest thing about all of this is that Kelly doesn't understand how ridiculous it sounds when he tries to defend it. "It's just a standard dish," he said when he defended his supposedly easy risotto. "I make it all the time." And I make forgeries of Seurat's "A Sunday Afternoon" during commercial breaks. It really all comes down to the fact that I'm not an industry person, which he seems to forget except for instances where he "just threw it together." But it works other ways, too. I was apparently the lucky charm for charades, having won every round. I can wrap gifts and embellish them with ease so that Martha might see me as a threat to her sharp cornered empire. And like every other intelligent person I have ever met that is numbers orientated, Kelly can't spell with confidence. Confidence. C-o-n-f-i-d-e-n-c-e. And I didn't even need it used in a sentence.