Have you ever cooked a well intended meal and it went so horribly wrong that your 6-year-old son felt the need to walk around the house wearing not one, but two, face masks to stop the horrible smell from reaching his precious (and dramatic) nostrils? Yes, he walked right over to the bin where we keep the face masks and said, "I knew these would come in handy for something other than the corona virus" as he piled them on. You also know a meal went south when the offending tool (pot) used to cook said meal ended up in your trash bin outside because it was either that option, or take 10 years off your life trying to scrape the food stuck to the bottom of it.
This happened last night. I had just finished baking a batch of oatmeal raisin cookies so delicious that my husband claimed they should be offered in the lobby of The Four Seasons. So maybe I was feeling a bit cocky coming off that baking success, but since the kids had already eaten their dinner and were playing relatively quiet trying to avoid their bedtime, I figured I'd just whip up my famous sweet and sour meatballs and rice, a long loved recipe passed down from my mom.
I come from a long line of women for whom cooking was more of a chore than anything else. My grandmother, a successful interior decorator, worked on her business around the clock and had no time for the domestic responsibilities that were typical of her time in the 1950's. My mom, therefore, didn't grow up learning how to cook, so she taught herself. Even though she also worked long days and often took night classes at the local College while raising 3 kids, that didn't stop her from making us dinner every night. So while I'm positive she would have rather collapsed on the couch to unwind and relax, she instead tried to quickly come up with a meal for 5, not really interested in how it tasted. To my mom, spices were offensive little jerk jars that mocked her with their fancy labels and unknown taste. I grew up being told that adding a pinch of salt could quite literally give you a heart attack right there on the spot, and so flavor was more of an idea than a practice for her. I remember one night when she told my dad that she thought the oven was broken so she wouldn't be able to use it for a few days until it got fixed. His response: "You promise?"
But try she did, and my sisters and I watched her put together meals night after night. Before any of us had kids and we lived just with our husbands, we all made a concerted effort to try and make cooking something that we enjoyed. We all had the trendiest new celebrity cookbooks and spent many nights perfecting our meals. Then we all had kids and spent a few years making bowls of cereal for dinner, but my sisters are both really good cooks. Incidentally, so is my mom now that she and my dad have more time on their hands. I, on the other hand, certainly have my moments, but last night was one of the most epic fails you could imagine.
My first mistake was using ground chicken instead of ground beef and not making any other changes to the recipe or timing whatsoever. My second mistake was leaving the grotesque chicken balls on a what I thought was a low simmer while joining my daughter to draw on our favorite color by number app. Actually, now that I think of it, I blame that app. It's just a time suck where you plan to spend a few minutes filling in the little circles with different, pretty colors and the next thing you know your house is on fire. Regardless of what took my attention away from the kitchen, once I moseyed on back in, something had clearly gone very, very wrong. One could easily describe it as an assault to the senses, and yes I had visions of just putting the house up for sale rather than deal with what was happening on the stove. I think the sauce was supposed to simmer on a very low heat for 30 minutes, and ended up on a much higher heat (oops) for closer to an hour (hehe). Somehow, the sauce seemed to have skipped right over caramelization and flew on over to crystallization, which honestly I didn't even know was possible; he bottom of the meatballs were akin to an ice skating rink.
To my husband's credit, he did attempt to eat the skating rink burnt chicken disaster, followed closely by about 7 cans of selzer and anything else he could eat to make the taste go away. When I put my son to bed he asked if I could go pick some flowers to shove up his nose, before he realized that my sweatshirt still smelled like burnt eggs (I didn't even use eggs!) and asked me to please leave his room. All in all, I think I proved my point that we need to start ordering takeout more often.