Fail

So tonight I decided to make a lovely dinner for my wonderful, wonderful husband. I was in the mood to try something new, so I found what looked like a great recipe for lemon poppy seed chicken. The recipe was really simple: not many ingredients, and basic instructions.

Apparently, it wasn't simple enough. Either that, or I suck. However, in this case, I choose, for my own self esteem, to blame the recipe. (Not that my self-esteem needs help.)

It was TERRIBLE. First I had a little problem with the butter. The recipe called for a half stick of butter, melted in a sauce pan, to brown the chicken with. Then I removed the chicken, as directed, to add the next ingredient. However, by the time the chicken was sufficiently browned, the butter was also brown, and in some spots, burned. So I kept the chicken, and dumped the butter, because it is supposed to be a part of the sauce. So I remelted butter til it looked like the picture (don't laugh) and then added the next ingredient: two tablespoons of flour.

Ok, so shouldn't a recipe tell you that the flour is going to chunk up into nasty little fried turdy looking things??? Out went that batch of butter and flour. The third time around I got it right. I applied the "cornstarch" method to flour (mixing it with a little cold water first) which I probably should have figured out the first time, but hey, give me credit.

So once that road bump was behind me, I followed the recipe to perfection! (I swear!) I finished the sauce, put the chicken back in the pan, and let it simmer for the proper amount of time. Then the fatal tasting. I almost spit it back out. It was bitter, and nasty, and did not taste at all like anything ANYONE would want to put on a nice dish of chicken and pasta. After several minutes of adding things to try to make it better (didn't work) I called on my husband to taste it.

He still claims that it wasn't that bad. He fiddled around with it for a while, then said that he would gladly have it for dinner, but I found a better place for it.



That's right...it all went down the sink. Luckily for us, Nathan can cook fantastically, and of course, in his effort to be unfailingly, annoyingly good at EVERYTHING, he never uses a recipe. After graciously telling me that it hadn't really been that bad, he made his own, much better, version of lemon poppy seed chicken.



















However, my cooking skills were not a complete failure. We used the same chicken, which, despite having sat in that awful concoction for a good part of an hour, had acquired a lovely, moist, light, lemony flavor. And of course, I made the most important part of the whole meal.



No one boils spaghetti like I do. No one.



Love to all,
Lissa