Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Failure IS An Option!

This week, we’ve asked you to share with us a special recipe. But, we’ve asked you to do more than just list out ingredients.
We challenged you to take us back…to take us into your memory, in 500 words or less

You'll never want to eat at my house again after I tell you this story.

I've been cooking with game meat for a quarter of a century, now. It's lean. It's healthy. In our area, it's as organic as anything ever was. It's LEAN. So one year, we added some beef fat to the grind when we made hamburger meat. That was the start of my undoing.

I found a recipe for Cornbread-Tamale Pie: a lovely casserole using ground meat. With hundreds of pounds of ground meat in my freezer, every new recipe was a treasure. It called for tomatoes, green chilies, onions, corn, spices and two whole pounds of ground meat! A winner!

I sauteed the onions. Then I added the meat and browned everything. Added the rest of the ingredients....what I didn't do was drain the meat. Yeah. Silly me.

Then I discovered I did not have enough yellow cornmeal. I did have a little bit of blue cornmeal, though.
Everything I knew about the color wheel left me, because I mixed the two together.

It smelled good. It was probably safe to eat. But when I pulled that dish out of the oven, it looked exactly like a bowl of greenish dog puke.

The undrained fat had bubbled up through the tomatoes and floated the corn to the edges. The greenish "cornbread" topping had greasy holes punctuating it, with tomato juice perking through like some weird geological feature at Yellowstone.

We stood as a family and looked at the abomination of a casserole, silent and frowning. Then we had Lucky Charms for dinner.


Always, feel free to comment! Trish in AZ

5 comments:

  1. Oh no! I've done things like that before and I can totally feel your pain! In fact, I do it so often my mom is starting to doubt I'm capable of living on my own at this point haha

    You really brought me into the story-nice job!

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  2. Lol! I don't think I could eat anything which resembles 'geological features at Yellowstone' either! I've had my own fair share of "breakfast for dinner" kind-of nights. :)

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  3. Great spin on the prompt! And eeeew!

    The equivalent in my household is an event known only as "Salmon and Clams."

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  4. I can just see that green casserole. I've had some, uh interesting cooking experiences too. Fortunately there are several fast food places close by.

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  5. lol. I love game meat. But I can totally see where that was not appetizing. Otherwise I totally want to eat at your house! Lucky charms are the best.

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