Dinner Improbable

A large part of what I do everyday, other than watching and teaching and playing with Addy, is making dinner.  This particular responsibility is not one I shy away from and I often tackle somewhat complicated meals because I enjoy cooking.

However, today's little venture into cuisine was less than exemplary.  It started out last night when we started to make some chicken stock that was supposed to sit for 6 - 24 hours.  This means that the whole chicken in the pot for a very long time.  This morning it finished, so I tried to use tongs to remove the chicken whole.  It was working, too, until gravity kicked in.  Suddenly, the tongs ripped through the body of the chicken like Rush Limbaugh tearing apart a Big Mac.  Bones the size of mice fingers went scattering into the stock and I was left holding a mass of skin and cartilage.  So I spend the next hour or so fishing out random pieces of meat and bone and placing them into various baggies for various reasons.  The rest of the day involved running errands, doing laundry, and putting Addy down for a nap... until about 3:30, when it was time to start dinner.

We like to have dinner about 5 or 6. so I figure 3:30 is a good time to start.  We're going to have stuffed cabbage, so I follow the recipe and put a head of cabbage into a pot of water to steam it.  For some reason, time starts to move wrong.  After what seems 10 minutes of cooking, it's 4:30, though perhaps this is because during this whole shebang I'm also having to watch Addy.  I'm making the filling as fast as I can, but each time I look at the recipe it gets longer and longer and the pan has less and less room.  I was amazed by how much they think will fit into a single cabbage.  After I finish the filling, the recipe calls for me to stuff each individual leaf with the stuff and put it in a casserole dish.  This was easier said than done.  Both the cabbage and the filling were about 10,000 degrees Kelvin, which is coincidentally the temperature at which the human hand melts.  After trying to stuff them, I then have to roll the cabbage leaves up, but they won't stay that way.  After that, for some reason the recipe has me cooking the things again for an hour while swimming in the chicken broth I made, which just washes out all the spices.  About this time, Amy gets home and dinner is already late.  Addy had to eat something else and get put to bed long before the food was ready.

When I pulled out the cabbage rolls from the oven, I had to take out each individual roll with tongs and leave the liquid behind.  By this point, the leaves have been steamed or baked for near an hour and a half.  They are see-through and held together by hope and faerie farts.  Tongs tear them to shreds so that I am left with a quivering mass of filling and cabbage on a plate and a pot filled with stock and filling.  I am hoping and praying that they are done, but no.  There's another PARAGRAPH of directions in the ingredients that involve reducing the stock and turning it into a delicious sauce.  So I put it on the burner and sit down.  A few minutes later, Amy and I smell the concoction burning itself into a mass of carbon on the bottom of the dutch oven.  Of course all the stock is gone and it is fairly inedible.  We eat the rolls but it wasn't nearly as flavorful as I had hoped it would be.

I am rather depressed that this was such a failed recipe.  Sure, it could be worse, but Addy didn't eat it and I spent all day on a mediocre meal. I'm not sure who is to blame, if anyone, but after spending most of the day trying to fix this darn meal, it's hard not to think it was my fault.  Hopefully, this will be the last epic fail at meal time.