I share recipes here at least a few times a month (except lately, when I've hardly been posting at all because I'm preoccupied with my mother's progressing illness).
I share awesome recipes. I explain how to get great results. I encourage you to try out my recipes with your own families.
We are no different than any family.  Occasionally, we eat out. Sometimes, we patch together leftovers or peanut butter on crackers or pancakes and eggs or something equally lame but mostly nutritious.
We also try a lot of new recipes, always hoping for the next amazing blog recipe. Unfortunately, those don't always go as well as we'd like.
Sometimes, we make a recipe that's lackluster - or worse, downright awful.
Sometimes, we have a string of lackluster and awful ones.
Here are a few:
The Sad Broccoli Soup
I found a foolproof recipe for cream of broccoli soup. A friend recommended it to me. She said that her family eats it at least once a week.
I photographed every step of the preparation and cooking because I just knew it was going to be great.
It even looked great:
Well, it wasn't great. It was horrible.
The soup tasted like broccoli and water were put into a blender and whirred around and poured into a bowl.
Can you imagine eating broccoli and water out of a blender? No bueno.
The Slimy Frittata
Next, I tried a broccoli cheese frittata recipe. I thought "Eggs and broccoli?! You can't go wrong!"
Oh, yes you can.
This recipe called for cream of broccoli soup, and the soup made the frittata slimy. The broccoli pieces were too small; the onion pieces were too big. The egg had a distasteful texture.
The eggs were gelatinous, cooked but not set up like scrambled eggs or even an omelet.
The thick layer of cheese atop the eggs made pretty much every slimy bite oily.
No bueno. No bueno at all.
The Cakey Pizza
We used to eat homemade pizza every Sunday.
When I went gluten-free, it was pretty much the end of our Sunday night tradition. Joe went on a quest to find a gluten-free pizza recipe.
Looks good, doesn't it?
Well, it wasn't.
We tried a few different recipes. The first was as hard and flat and tasty as corrugated cardboard. One was so light and spongey that it tasted like cake topped with sauce, cheese, and pepperoni.
Both were unpalatable.
The Gritty Peanut Butter Dough
A friend and colleague wrote a wonderful e-book full of activities to do with children. I planned to write about it here, so the girls and I tried one of the activities.
We were supposed to make a dough out of peanut butter and cocoa and powdered milk (and probably some other things, but I don't remember now).
I made the dough, just as the directions said. I noticed white granules in the dough, but I thought that's how it was supposed to be.
We made our peanut butter dough bird nests, including some pretzel sticks to make the girls' look more realistic, and some candy eggs.
Then we attempted to eat the bird nests.
EW.
The white granules (which I figured out was the 5-year-old {maybe older!}Â powdered milk I used) were crunchy and sort of grainy. The dough was not pleasant at all.
I don't think it was the fault of the recipe or the author, by the way. I'm pretty sure my powdered milk was too old, soaked up water from the air, and made these weird clumpy granules. I didn't want to use these photos on my blog to endorse an ebook, and I didn't get a chance to make new peanut butter dough, so you never got to hear about it.
Sorry about that.
Broccoli Slaw Does Not Double as Spaghetti
I had been having a big old pity party over my un-gluten-ness, and I just wanted a big plate of spaghetti and meatballs.
I saw something on Pinterest about using broccoli slaw in place of spaghetti, and I thought that was my perfect solution.
Yay!
I could have spaghetti and meatballs!
I steamed the broccoli slaw, topped it with flavorful spaghetti sauce with meatballs, and sprinkled on Italian seasoning and some shaved Parmesan cheese. It looked delicious.
It wasn't as horrible as some of the above recipes, but this tasted just like broccoli with spaghetti sauce. It wasn't remotely like spaghetti. That person on Pinterest was full of beans.
The Hot Pink Cupcakes
Last but not least, sometimes the recipes taste okay but fall apart later.
That was the case with the hot pink cupcakes from our All That Glitters princess party.
Allie had eaten one cupcake, and when she asked for a second, I handed it over.
A few minutes later, I found her. She had removed her clothing and smeared the pretty hot pink cupcake all over her body.
That mess went right up the stairs and into the bathtub.
In conclusion, please do not despair when your meals (or your children) go south, when a new recipe tastes horrible, or when something you've always liked suddenly turns on you.
It happens to everyone.
Throw it out and go for Chinese food.
Vanderbilt Wife says
I consider myself a pretty good cook but we all have disasters, don't we? The many times I set off the smoke detector. The time I put cloves in enchiladas instead of chili powder. Curdled corn chowder. On Saturday night we had some VERY mediocre chicken and fried rice. Eh. We have our good days and bad days.