I like to think I was justified in my decision.

The first warning should have come when I opened not one, but two packets of the vile stuff — largely due to its seemingly small size, and my hunger which can only be described as “immense”. The whiff of the artificial cheese-like powder assaulted my nostrils like a legion of tiny trebuchets, the kind of vile stale-cheddar aroma that is reserved only for the most cheaply-made of cheesesque foodstuffs. Driven on by my terrible urge to feed, in went both packets to the requisite combination of milk, water and butter, in to the churning abyss which — while at once fairly tranquil — soon resembled a boiling pit of sulphur, threatening (and occasionally succeeding) to spill over and forever taint the surface of my oven. The aroma surrounding the pan was one I won’t soon forget, a sickening stench of stale cheddar, the vivid yellow colour — my phone camera hardly doing it justice — merely adding to the experience.

The real tragedy of the story is that a large portion of this disgusting maelstrom has ended up squarely in my stomach, through equal parts desperate hunger and a desire to avoid wasting money. The flavour is every bit as bad as I’d imagined, punctuated by the occasional, tiny nugget of dry cheese powder which managed to escape the moisture by hiding within one of the tiny pasta tubes, an experience not unlike realizing that raisin you just bit down on is actually a spider. While perhaps not my most harrowing mealtime experience, it ranks up in the top twenty or so.

And so, I must ask you all, for your own safety and mental wellbeing: don’t make the mistake I did. Don’t buy this terrible, terrible mixture. Please.

And there it is. Perfect. Pure. This is what I wanted in my stomach today. Oh yes.

To say I don’t cook very often would be an understatement; in fact, I’d go as far as to suggest that the vast majority of my diet is based upon microwaved ready-meals and various pre-made concoctions that come in tins. Occasionally I’ll branch out and experiment — such as the time I successfully re-heated cooked sausages by using a toaster — but for the most part, it’s best for everyone’s sake that I refrain. Today, I decided to attempt an ill-fated experiment with making enchiladas, courtesy of an Old El Paso meal kit. Having had excellent results from the nachos kit in the past, what could go wrong?

As it turns out, a great deal.

Given that the kit provides enough food for 3-4 people, I decided to go halves on the ingredients. Easy — I’d bought two packs of cooked chicken and a bag of grated cheese, but it was easy enough to separate the cheese and only open a single pack of chicken. The pre-heating the oven and slicing the chicken parts went pretty well, too, though of course I got a couple of oil splashes from stir-frying said chicken. The fail begins when I was instructed to mix the “spice mix” powder with hot water, and combine that with both sachets of tomato sauce. I did so, splashing tomato substance all over the kitchen and myself numerous times in the process, and it was only after I looked upon my creation with pride before I remembered the whole halves thing.

Shit.

I feel like a kid on Christmas Eve who just discovered Santa isn't real.

Time to fry up more chicken and acquire more minor oil-burns (including, of course, fumbling and pouring far too much oil into the pan), realizing the bowl wasn’t even big enough to combine the new quantities of chicken and cheese required and thus having to combine them clumsily into a larger bowl (more spillage), chicken going everywhere as I tried to combine the un-mixed and mixed parts together. But surely, even if I end up with too much food, it can’t go wrong now?

Wrong again. Now it comes to spooning the filling into the tortillas, during which point I somehow managed to get spicy tomato sauce all over my leg without even fully understanding how. I also realized that the baking tray it required was currently used to house the sauce/cheese/chicken mixture, requiring yet another messy transfer before my truly appalling attempts to wrap the filling in the circles of corn and wheat. And then I realize the baking tray is far, far too small, requiring the kind of desperation that only a starving chef could appreciate, literally forcing the things down into a barely-coherent mass in the tray, my miscalculations on filling size providing less and less in each tortilla, which helped only slightly. Pouring on the rest of the sauce and the remainder of the cheese, more tomato goodness went everywhere.

Finally — not sure if the tray is oven-safe or not but hardly caring at this point — I thrust it into the kiln-like depths and awaited the result.

The results: Not quite as advertised, though I blame myself entirely for this failure. A mass of gooey, red-and-yellow sludge topped with what almost resembles elbow macaroni, concealing beneath a sad, crushed amalgm of god only knows what, forced into far too small a space with all the wrong quantities, begging to be eaten just so it can be put out of its miserable existence.

And this is why I’m not a chef.