By Amani Kimball-McKavish

“I am not a good cook,” is what I should have prefaced my meal with as I set four plates down on the dinner table. On a recent weekend, I tried my best to recreate a few gourmet recipes that I found on the internet. I prepared a main course and a dessert for the harshest food critics in America– my brother and his friends. 

While scrolling for a little bit too long on TikTok one day, I came across a video about avocado pesto pasta. The video was shot in an aesthetically appealing way, intended to be a soothing, ASMR-type video, which is how it caught my attention. The comments on the video were all in favor of the pesto, and as Upper School English teacher and Match adviser Vlastik Svab says, “you can always trust what you see on the internet.”* After watching the video multiple times, I decided I wanted to try the recipe for myself. It is important to note that I had never had pesto in my life, but I took the TikTok as a sign to not only bring a new flavor to my taste buds but also test out my cooking abilities in front of an audience. Perhaps my ill-conceived plan to cook something I had not yet tried foreshadowed the entire experience. 

Unfortunately, the TikTokker didn’t respond to the comments asking for a recipe, so it was up to me to find an avocado pesto recipe that seemed to replicate @sloan.byrd’s pasta from the video. Although I had not heard of avocado pesto prior to seeing the TikTok, it happens to be a popular, healthy sauce to put on pasta. I found multiple recipes that varied just slightly from each other, and I ultimately chose From My Bowl’s vegan recipe. 

From My Bowl’s recipe was easy to follow, although it was overly wordy in some areas. It used phrases such as, “flesh of one large avocado,” rather than stating “one avocado.” Other than the occasional attempt of being too flowery, I really liked the recipe. All I had to do was purchase the few ingredients that were required, put them into a food processor, and blend.

With a portion of my main course decided, I knew I needed a meat to complement the pasta. My personal favorite meat is chicken, but my brother Collin Kimball-McKavish (‘23) prefers red meat. I decided to cook cheeseburgers and lightly seasoned chicken breasts to satisfy all of my guests. I planned to put Montreal Steak seasoning on the burgers and Kick’n Chicken chili-lime seasoning on the chicken. 

I shopped for all of the necessary ingredients at Kroger, and it was a conveniently short list of items. The only difficult item to find was nutritional yeast, which I learned, after some research, is most commonly used by vegans to act in place of non-vegan ingredients, especially in cheese.

The ingredients I purchased from Kroger.

After coming home with the ingredients, the night started off great. I turned on March Madness to occupy the boys and gave them some chips and salsa to munch on while I was working hard in the kitchen.

I began cooking by putting the herbs, yeast, and broth into a food processor to make the pesto. This was a soothing process, as I got to de-stem each individual leaf of basil and parsley. An additional part of making the pesto that was exciting was adding each ingredient and having it progressively taste better. Pearse Riendeau (‘22) said my avocado pesto tasted “earthy but delicious” prior to adding it to the pasta.

The avocado pesto in process.

After making the pesto, I boiled the pasta and seasoned the meat. By this point in my cooking adventure, about an hour and a half had passed, and my brother and his friends were becoming cranky. I rushed to finish everything, and in my haste, I put a colossal amount of pesto on the pasta. This was a terrible mistake. 

The finished meal.

To detail how the bright green pasta invaded his taste buds and left him repulsed, Sam Smith (‘23) said, “it tastes like caterpillars.” This was not an overreaction. In addition, Collin said, “my dog wouldn’t even eat this.” For reference, I have a three-month-old Bernese Mountain Dog puppy, whose diet consists of bananas, eggs, watering cans, and metal chairs. As much as I was hoping for my meal to wow the crowd, I cannot deny that I ruined it. The avocado pesto tasted like I combined an assortment of plant leaves with the slightest bit of lemon to form a baby food-like consistency, with which I doused my fusilli pasta.

Riendeau, who tried the pesto before I added it to the pasta, said, “If you had put half as much sauce on it, it would be dank. It’s just that the overwhelming quantity of it took away from the quality of it.” Perhaps he was right, but the dish was so painfully disgusting that I could not, and would not, believe it. After all, the pasta looked like it was covered in Nickelodeon’s green slime, and I probably could have sprinkled a few grass clippings from my yard and no one would have noticed.

The bright green avocado pesto pasta.

Besides the horrendous pasta, the rest of the meal was delicious. The chili-lime seasoning on the chicken had a wonderfully tangy taste, which would have gone perfectly with the pasta. The cheeseburger was fairly plain; however, the seasoning had a salty element that I was not expecting. Collin said, “the burger brought the meal up and made it a 2/10.” He is so generous. Each bite of the burger had the sweet and sour taste of ketchup, combined with the soft, chewy potato roll, and a salty aftertaste provided by the spices.

For dessert, I looked through various recipes to decide what I wanted to make. Dessert is by far my favorite part of any meal, and while I most definitely am not a cook, I consider myself to be a decent baker. I hoped to find something that I had never cooked before, and I finally settled on sugar cookie s’mores.

The step-by-step recipe was not informative at all, so I prepared the dish on my own. I roasted marshmallows on a fork over the stove, which is safe, according to my dad. I laid out two sugar cookies and placed a sliver of chocolate on one of the cookies and the toasted marshmallows on the other cookie. I sandwiched the two sides together, and the dessert was complete. I was not ecstatic about the taste of my creation, as its flavor did not jump out at me like a chocolate cake from Shyndigz would. The sugar cookie s’mores are not a dish I would crave in the future, nor attempt to make again in place of other desserts, but the softness of the cookie provided a better texture than a crunchy graham cracker in my opinion. Overall, the dessert tasted almost exactly like a s’more, but with less crumbs to pick up after its consumption. 

My sugar cookie s’mores.

While my cooking adventure may have been a failure, it was a great opportunity to try new foods and spend time with friends. If there’s one thing I learned from this experience, it is that I have hit rock bottom, and my cooking skills can only go up from here. 

* Editor’s Note: This was sarcasm.

All photos by Amani Kimball-McKavish.