The World According to Mommy

I enjoy cooking. I’m not particularly good at it, but I enjoy it. I like the whole process of putting a meal together, and I also think I enjoy creating something which my family will enjoy. This makes me happy.

What does not make me happy is the fact that the vast majority of the meals I prepare aren’t any good.

You see, I’m not the kind of cook who can just throw things together, who knows which flavors go with other flavors, and who can tell exactly which spice is needed to really make the dish perfect. I cannot do any of those things, thus, I must follow recipes. I’m fine with this. It can be challenging, however, to find recipes that I know Matt will enjoy, because he knows what he likes, and what he likes usually involves some sort of meat product, a starch, and absolutely no weird sauces or condiments. I am fine with this, too. I know my parameters, so I always set out to find recipes that I think he might like.

However, as I’ve said, almost all the recipes I’ve made have hovered around the “fine” and “edible” side of things to the “truly awful”. It’s not easy to realize you’re a failure practically every time you sit down to dinner, but I keep trying new things, because 1. I only have a few good meals in my arsenal that I can rely on, and 2. It feels really good when I finally hit on something that’s a keeper.

Last night was definitely one of the failure nights. I tried a new recipe in my Crockpot which was touted as “Your whole meal in the Crockpot!” You start with steaks at the bottom of the Crockpot, then add potatoes wrapped in foil (which would become baked potatoes), then corn on the cob wrapped in foil on top of that. I hadn’t planned this meal out, but around lunchtime today I realized that I didn’t know what I was going to make for dinner, so I broke out all the recipes that I print and save for later. This one looked good, and I knew that we had steaks in the freezer, so I decided to give it a try.

Oh, did I mention the steaks I used where T-bones? Whatever one notch below horrified is, that’s what Matt was when he came home and discovered this.

I don’t know, I just didn’t think about what high quality T-bone steaks are and that putting $10 steaks in the Crockpot was probably not the best idea. All I know is that the recipe called for steaks, and these were the steaks we had.

So dinner was terrible, and expensive, but boy did Merchant eat like a king. And I can't really say why most of the recipes I try end up being fed to the dog. Maybe I should just eliminate our grocery budget entirely and add all that money to the eating-out column.