I’m finally getting back on track with my 40 recipes. After a sluggish week last week, I started Monday eight recipes behind my goal. A quick night of three dishes brought me back to a more managable five, but time keeps on ticking away, and I can only eat so much each day.

Last night was my night to recoup with the recipes for walleye and mushrooms (without mushrooms), skillet bread, and golden garlic and potato soup. This necessitated a bit of shopping, both for ingredients and for a cast iron skillet. But the cast iron cook ware wasn’t even the most interesting aspect to my night in the kitchen.

Two of last night’s three recipes required the use of white wine. I am not a wine connoisseur, and I know absolutely nothing about the aged beverage. All I knew was that I needed a few cups to add to my dishes. I grabbed the cheapest bottle of white wine I could find, and I went to the car.

After returning home from the store, wine bottle in hand, I came to an important realization – wine bottles don’t have twist-off caps. To make matters worse, I don’t own a corkscrew. Well, that isn’t entirely true. Somewhere in my apartment, there was a pocket knife that included the curly utensil. After 20 minutes of searching, I couldn’t find it. I needed to devise other means to access the wine.

I went for my toolbox and I grabbed a couple of screwdrivers. “I’ll dig into the cork and pry it our of the bottle,” I thought. But when I went to push the screwdriver into the cork, I only succeeded in pushing the cork even further down the neck of the bottle.

Time to regroup and rethink.

That’s when I had my brainstorm. I already have my screwdrivers out, and I have some screws in the toolbox. Why not just screw into the cork and pull it out with a pliers. As I sat with the bottle of cheap wine between my legs, where I held it so I could use a needle nose pliers to pry out a cork with a wood screw drilled down the center, I felt very classy indeed.

The food itself was alright. I’ll definitely make the soup again – it was easy and very tasty. The fish (which I had to substitute tapala for walleye, which is apparently out of season) was a little too fishy tasting for me, and the cream sauce didn’t help. The skillet bread partially cooked while I tried to defrost it, so it didn’t rise the way it should have, but it was overall pretty good and something I’d like to try again.

All in all, one of my more successful nights by the stove since starting this experiment.

Tonight after work I’ll be heading over to Molly’s to make turkey and broccoli alfredo. Check out the recipe:

Turkey and broccoli alfredo

• 6-ounce package of fettuccine, uncooked
• 2 cups of frozen, chopped broccoli
• One 10-3/4-ounce can of cream of mushroom soup
• 1/2 cup of milk
• 3/4 cup of grated Parmesan cheese
• 3 cup of cooked turkey, cubed
• 1/8 teaspoon of pepper

Prepare fettuccine according to package directions. Add broccoli in the last five minutes of cooking; drain. In a large skillet over medium-high heat, mix soup, milk, cheese, turkey, pepper and fettuccine mixture; cook until it’s warm, stirring often.

This recipe makes four servings.