Semi-Disastrous Cooking

Earlier this week:


I was cooking chicken, not that hard right? You put in it the pan, turn on the heat and let her cook. Well, we have these spiffy pots that cook without water, so you throw the chicken in, wait til it whistles, shut the lid and let it cook. The trick is turning down the burner temperature. Well, I forgot. Ten or twelve minutes later: Sniff. Sniff, sniff. Yep, something's burning. I run to the kitchen, yank off the lid and low and behold, the bottom of the pan is charred black! We stuck a fork in the chicken and pulled it off the blackened bottom and put it on a plate.


The aftermath: The chicken was moist, not burnt (but for one small portion, which remained in the pan), and tasted great. Miracle! I put the hot pan under boiling hot water, swished and the black came off! We had to scrub a little bit, but the pan survived without even scrubbing a layer off of it.


Two days later:


I wanted cookies, had for a week. I decided on No Bakes. It takes ten minutes and I'm done. I mixed them all up, set them all out, waited for them to cool just long enough not to burn my tongue off and took a bite, waiting for the flavor to hit the senses. The flavor hit and I immediately scrunched up my face in disgust, wanting to spit out what was in my mouth. I swallowed. Nasty! What had I done?! I followed the recipe, I'd made it a hundred times!


Ryan tasted them as well. "They're . . . different," was the comment. We investigated. The culprit: rancid shortening. We threw away the lot of them and started afresh with a new container of shortening.

10 minute cookies = 1.5 hours


Yesterday morning:


I got up early so I could make Ryan breakfast before he went to work. I made French toast and orange julius. I didn't wait for the pan to heat up, so the toast stuck to the pan (oops). But, otherwise they turned out well. We sat down to eat, syruped the toast and dug in. We took a bite, started to chew and we both paused, looking at each other.


We swallowed.


"Does cinnamon go bad? Vanilla?" This time it was the syrup, not rancid, but the off brand of 'aritificially butter flavored.' Um, not so good. Plain French toast was the order of the day. Mmm, mmm good.


On the up side:


Bad cooking = Good stories