A new wife's attempt at cooking

While thankfully there haven't been too many awful meals, a few recent ones haven't exactly been "keepers," to use a Nichols family term. Each for a different reason, which means I'm learning (hopefully)!

Meal flop #1: Sicilian Meat Roll and an oven fiasco
I got home from work a while ago with plan to make a "meat roll." I knew I had all the ingredients (always a good thing, which often doesn't happen), but failed to realize I was making "meat loaf." Not a big problem, but meat loaf isn't my favorite, so I'm not sure why I chose to make it. Lesson #1: Since you're the cook, make meals you like! I also didn't see that the recipe called for extra lean meat, which we didn't have. Normally I would buy lean, but when you can get the fatty stuff sooo much cheaper than the lean, it's hard to pass up. Lesson #2: Buy lean meat because grease weirds me out and make me not want to eat the meal. So I go ahead and make this "meat roll," and place on a "baking pan" as the recipe calls, which to me means a cookie sheet. As it begins to cook, I hear sizzling and popping coming from the oven. I, being the genius that I am at times, take the pan out in hopes of pouring the grease into the sink (yes, I know you're not supposed to do that) and proceed to drip the grease all over the bottom of the oven. I "degrease" the meat loaf pan, but leave the grease at the bottom of the oven planning to clean it later. The meat loaf continues to cook and instead of a nice smelling "sicilian" smell, I almost pass out from being in the room for an hour with the smell of burning grease. Lesson #3: Don't let grease drip to the bottom of the oven. I took the meat loaf out when it was done and decided a great idea would be to let the oven clean itself! Less work for me, right!? I quickly realized after setting it on the "oven clean" setting, this wasn't the greatest idea. Smoke came pouring out of the stove top. Lesson #4: Don't use the oven clean setting unless you want the smoke alarm to go off again in the whole entire apartment building. See Spaghetti for that story. Kody came home from the library to a freaking out wife waving dish towels frantically near the smoke detectors in hopes that the smoke alarms would not go off. Rest your fears, they didn't go off and we (I) didn't burn down the building either. Lesson #5: Take the batteries out of the smoke detectors if you suspect they may go off and you don't want them to (Kod taught me this one). But remember to put them back in! In the end, we enjoyed our somewhat good tasting meat loaf on our back porch with our winter coats while we waited for our apartment to stop smelling awful. Lots of candles and fans were used that night. Lesson #6: The meat loaf was actually pretty good as leftovers (when all the grease had dried, yuck!) and I might even make it again at some point.

Meal flop #2: Chicken Linguine Alfredo
These next two don't have quite such elaborate stories, but I learned lessons from them anyway. I got a little cookbook from my mom for my birthday that has some great looking recipes in it. So I decided to try the chicken linguine alfredo. Kod actually ended up making this one for his "Thursday is the day Kody makes dinner for us" night, but the lesson learned isn't that Kody is a bad cook. He's actually really great! It's just that some recipes aren't as good in real life as they sound on paper. I actually called my mom before we ate and told her we were trying it. I should've been expecting less than the best from her report that she had tried it and wasn't too much of a fan. But I had been looking forward to the meal all week! Well, the alfredo was a disappointment. It just needed something more and since I have no experience cooking, I have no idea what else it needs. But something. One way to tell if a meal was well-liked in our home is to see how long the leftovers sit in the refrigerator. This one sat for about a week and I finally finished it up a few days ago for lunch. Lesson #7: Listen to mom's advice and don't make something she isn't a fan of.

Meal flop #3: Sweet and Sour Chicken
I'll start with the lesson this time. Lesson #8: Don't make something Kody doesn't like. He probably won't eat it. I should put a disclaimer on that statement, saying that Kod has eaten basically everything I've cooked for him, which is pretty impressive. This is the first dinner he took about two bites of and said he'd eat some other leftovers instead (frozen pizza). My mom gave me a recipe for this, but I used a different recipe that I'd already marked for some reason. Lesson #9: Use Mom's recipes. They'll probably turn out better. The recipe I used called for deep frying the chicken in oil with a batter around it, which I sort of attempted to do at first (with an itty bitty bit of oil) and then quit, so we had some weird batter stuff floating around in our dinner. Mom never deep fried anything, so I'm sure her recipe would've been better in that respect. But the real problem came when Kody saw that I had dumped a can of pineapple and pineapple juice into the wok where the chicken was cooking. Lesson #10: Pineapple and fruit do not go with pizza or chicken (and I'm sure other things), according to Kody. It weirded him out way too much. He tried to eat just some of the rice, but couldn't even handle that! Side note: leftovers are still in the fridge.

Sorry, no pictures of these wonderful meals! (We're trying not to remember them!)