Under-achieving House Goddess

Yesterday after dropping the boys off at school, I made my way to the grocery store. I picked up a few random things we needed like Milk, gum (it's a staple) and a few other things.

While at the grocery store I thought "hm-mm, maybe I should try to cook today." So off I went in search of something semi-nutritious and easy enough for me to cook. I'm learning and baby steps are best.

I picked up Chicken Tenderloins, a sack of potatoes and salad. Hmm, that along with my pantry should produce a fine meal. On hand I had peas, cheese, bacon, Texas toast and ranch dressing along with some seasonings.

As I was pulling into my neighborhood, my head started to pound and my stomach started to ache. Ugh, just what I needed. Yep I am sick, barely made it in the house.

Not wanting my plans of making a home made, semi-nutritious and delectable dinner for the fam to be foiled I decided to push on. Even called the eldest to come over for some grub.

So last night even though I didn't feel well I made the effort to cook my family a semi-nutritious meal.

The meal consisted of Bacon Ranch Chicken tenderloins, seasoned potato wedges, garlic cheese Texas toast, peas and salad and frosted brownies for desert.

Sounds good right. Yeah it kinda looks better in print, but in reality it pretty much sucked. The chicken was OK, garlic toast was good, peas well they were canned so they were OK. Salad nobody ate. The potato wedges ate through our tongues and probably burned our esophagus.

The wedges really were that bad.

Someone once told me cooking was like science. Well I sucked at science so that's my excuse.

In prepping the potatoes I "followed" a recipe from the Internet. Everything was clicking along until I realized I didn't have some of the ingredients. Ingredients like onion powder. Who the hell keeps onion powder on hand. I sure don't.

Without the proper ingredients I had to improvise. That right there is what did me in. Improv works in the movies, it works in comedy clubs but not with cooking apparently.

All Seasoning salt is what I improvised with. It had some of the ingredients in the mix so it seemed a reasonable substitute.

After substituting the amounts called I added it to the taters. They didn't seem to have enough seasoning on them so I added more till it looked good. NEVER do that!

Well everything seemed to be going well I was on a schedule and everything. Those fries were in the oven. Things came out on time and the chicken was juicy..didn't look browned enough but next time I will sear it in a pan first.

The boys came up to eat and everyone loaded their plates.

The first one to bite into the potato wedge actually had mounds of catsup on the wedge and his eyes literally bugged out of his head. Those wedges were horrible.

So the lesson of the day is follow the recipe to the 9nth and do not substitute even if it sounds like it makes sense.

I still suck at cooking, but I'm trying and isn't that what counts.