I Blame The Internet

This week I set a new personal record for the BEST dinners I ever cooked... and the WORST. To accomplish my goal of having dinner on the table every night, I planned out a dinner menu and a shopping list through pay day. To make my life a little easier, I decided to use my crock pot for most of the meals. I made an AWESOME taco soup fashioned after Katie's recipe and DELICIOUS pork chile verde like my mom makes. Art has been taking his dinners to work and all of his co-workers have been envious of his meals. Well, most of the meals...

I also threw in a couple recipes I found on the Internet that had good reviews and made them exactly as directed, and they were both undesirable to some degree. I made a recipe for crock pot pork chops and they came out a really strange, stringy, tough texture. The taste was good, but the texture was so uninviting I couldn't eat them. But then, night before last, I endured the most horrendous cooking failure of my entire life... and I blame the Internet. That's where I got the recipe, so I'm not going down for this one! I attempted to make teriyaki chicken in the crock pot so I came home for lunch and followed the recipe exactly- which was one can of crushed pineapple, one cup of teriyaki marinade, and chicken. I thought the concoction sounded a little strange, but put my trust in the Internet and proceeded anyway. I set it to low and went back to work.

When I got home from picking up the baby from my mom's house, my house smelled like weirded out brownies. That's not a good sign. I thought maybe the food itself would smell better than the house so I went and lifted the lid and took a whiff and I swear I almost puked. It was the most foul stench I had ever encountered and I was immediately ill. Then I thought, maybe if I hold a piece of chicken away from the pot it will smell better. No such luck. You couldn't pay me to taste it. Never have I cooked anything in my entire life that got transferred to the garbage can so quickly. I took the garbage out to the dumpster straight away, came back in, took the crock pot itself OUTSIDE, opened up all the windows and doors, turned on all the fans, unleashed at least half a bottle of Febreeze, and it STILL smelled awful. My house had been marinating in that odor for hours! To make things worse, it was the last day I had planned on my menu so I had nothing else to make. I waved my white flag and went to Taco Bell though I was still so nauseous when I got back, I could hardly eat.

I guess there are a few morals to this story: stick with the tried and true recipes; if a recipe sounds like it won't come out good, it probably won't; and last but not least, the Internet can't be trusted.