Cooking Fails

I am no chef.  Let's clear that up right away!  But I do know my way around the kitchen pretty well (with occasional phone calls to my mom, aunt, or grandmother for questions :)

I've been married now for almost 16 months and cooking for longer than that & while I've had some dry chicken here and there or some less than perfect kitchen flow (i.e. the sides are done early or not done yet, etc.), I've yet to have a terrible, no good, all out cooking fail.  Until this weekend that is.

Friday night we took the night off from working out and were planning to carb up for our 5K in the morning.  You know, cause you really need to carb up for 3.1 miles!  Obviously, an excuse to eat carbs important!  I'd been planning all week to make stuffed manicotti shells & we were looking forward to it!!  Mmmm!

via

I'd only made them once before so I kind of reviewed the recipe with my mom the day before & Friday night I got down to assembly!  Oh we were hungry...they were gonna be GUD. After the stuffing of the shells, and the smearing of the sauce on top, I popped 'em in the oven & prepared the yummy bread to go along with it.

After 25 long minutes, the timer went off, I pulled them out of the oven and tried a little sample.  Well, actually I tried to try a little sample....except the noodles were still hard. Huh!?  What!?!  They'd been in the oven for 25 minutes alrea......oh my gosh!!!  I forgot to boil the noodles!

I forgot to boil the noodles!!!  Noooooo!  I'm so hungry!  How did this happen?  Omg I feel like a moron!  Oh honey, I'm so sorry!!  Oh nooooooooo.  Ughh.  I was really looking forward to those noodles!!

Well crap.  I ruined dinner.  Cooking fail!  Much laughter ensued from Brandon, myself, and my mother!!  :)

I found some whole wheat spiral noodles in the cabinet so we tried to salvage the meal, ha. We put the spirals on to boil (this is a really important step y'all!), scraped all the sauce off, smushed the filling out of the hard noodles and made a hodgepodge pasta.  It was eh.  I ended up eating cereal.  :)

I guess cooking fails are bound to happen sooner or later right!?  But 2 in one weekend? Really??

I found a homemade granola bar recipe on Pinterest and we love some granola bars in this house.  So I thought it would be a great idea to make our own....that way you know exactly what's in it and this recipe had only 4 ingredients.  Even better!

recipe

Well turns out I didn't quite have a half cup of honey as needed.  So I just upped the amount of peanut butter.  No big deal, PB is sticky, too.  It's gonna be good!

I also threw in a cup of craisins & about 3/4 of a cup of mini chocolate chips.  Yum!

Actually fail.  You see that upped my ratio of non sticky material to sticky material.  I patted the dryish mixture into the 9x13 dish and baked them as suggested.  Unfortunately, upon cutting into them, each piece fell apart like regular ol granola.  There was no bar about it!

Sunday, I tried to salvage them.  I bought some more honey, remixed, repatted into the 9x13 & put them in the fridge.  This time they're definitely bars!!

But very peanut buttery.  Don't get me wrong I love me some PB, but with the extra PB I added and the peanuts in the mix, it's a little too much.  These aren't a complete fail - but they need to good redo for perfecting in my opinion!

My weekend in the kitchen was less than successful!  Sugar - I think I just need to stay out of there for a while (hello take out!)....they say things happen in threes anyway :/  I feel really sorry for Brandon (and myself) to find out what fail 3 might be!?

Here's hoping my bad luck stops at 2!!