You Say Tomato, I Say Let's Go Out to Eat Instead

So, I had grand plans for dinner tonight. I was going to make the Tomato Ricotta Frittata from The Italian Slow Cooker. The recipe simply called for chopped basil, grape tomatoes, ricotta, grated parmesan, and eggs to be mixed together and dumped into the crock pot. Simple, right? No. Nothing is ever simple in the kitchen of Cooking Whoops.

I'll spare you a description of my woeful basil-chopping, cheese-grating (I HATE grating cheese), and tomato-halving skills. Let's just say I successfully transferred the mixture into my Cuisinart Multi-Cooker. The frittata was supposed to cook for 60 to 75 minutes on High. For some reason, it still looked like liquid eggs after an hour.

At this point, I received a text inquiring whether my family would like to go out for Indian food. Food is always better in good company (and always better when it's not at my house), so our consensus was that we should indeed go out to dinner with our friend.

This turned out to be the best decision we could have made. When we got home, I unplugged the slow cooker and started emptying out the contents onto a plate. I'd worked so hard on that cup of grated parmesan and was wondering about the results.

I took one bite of the frittata and cringed. Not only was the basil unappetizingly black (I guess I left this thing in the slow cooker for too long, but isn't that the point?) but the frittata had an overwhelmingly acrid flavor. Upon closer inspection, this horrible sourness seemed to be coming from the halved grape tomatoes. I decided to try one of the raw ones, and indeed, they were the culprit. Moral of the story: always taste the raw tomatoes before deciding to use them. Or, just go out for Indian food.

How to Screw Up Creamed Spinach, Part Two

I guess I was a bit discombobulated tonight. I'd left my Blackberry at Starbucks, or so I thought, and when I went back to look for it, it was nowhere to be found. A young boy said he thought he'd seen it on a pile of newspapers. I located the pile, but not the phone.

Then I burned my thumb trying to take some underdone frozen tortellini out of the toaster oven. I guess I should've used an oven mitt. My thumb now has a blister on it, and I use my thumb to type, so this post might be shorter than usual.

Now we get to the spinach. Mark Bittman's simple creamed spinach recipe directs one to parboil (is that the right term?) and finely chop the spinach before plunging it into a pan filled with melted butter and cream. Preoccupied with my Blackberry and all of the juicy E-mails someone was probably reading, with my thumb wrapped in a wet paper towel, I just didn't have the patience to boil water and put the spinach in there and chop it. So I just sauteed the spinach in some butter - well, more accurately, I first put a pan of butter on the burner and wondered why it wasn't melting, and then realized I'd turned on the wrong burner - and then poured a bunch of cream in the pan.

I now had a bunch of sauteed spinach leaves and a large puddle of unabsorbed, watery cream. I would have taken a picture of this disaster for you, but as I mentioned before, I am no longer in possession of my Blackberry. (I use the Blackberry camera to take these unappetizing photos.)

(Fortunately, someone just called my home phone to say that they found it on the sidewalk outside Safeway.)

ETA: I just realized that I never posted "How to Screw Up Creamed Spinach, Part One." So I guess I'll stick it in right here. The last time I attempted to make Mark Bittman's creamed spinach, I tried to get creative and added garam masala, instead of nutmeg, for an ostensibly Indian flavor. I then dusted the spinach generously with black pepper. When I tried it, I almost coughed. I mean, I know I put in a good amount of pepper, but this was almost unpalatable. I looked at the list of ingredients on the garam masala jar - the second ingredient was black pepper.

O Cauliflower, What Went Wrong?

So, I tried to make roasted cauliflower. It ended up being blackened cauliflower. I really wasn't trying for Cajun cuisine, so I wonder what went wrong. I tossed the veggie in oil and put in a 450 oven for about 20 minutes. This is what happened. A package of Thai sauce could not save it. Aren't you glad we didn't invite you for dinner tonight?

What's Wrong With This Dinner?

Tonight I'm initiating a new category of posts called "What's Wrong With This Dinner?" Let me give you the backstory behind tonight's disaster.

I had some frozen panko-breaded basa fillets, a tomato, an onion, an avocado, some cilantro, and some leftover rice.

I thought I would make some tomato-avocado salsa. I put some badly-diced tomatoes, onions, and avocados in a dish, and added olive oil, lemon juice, badly chopped cilantro and some salt. This actually would have been somewhat successful except the avocado was unripe. This unfortunate avocado had the peculiar defect of being both unripe and brown at the same time. I thought only overripe avocados suffered from brownness.

Then I tried to make some cilantro-garlic mayonnaise. I think I needed to have used more cilantro, and also, it would have helped if I'd used a blender.

The rice was also a problem. I don't know what I was thinking, exactly - maybe I was half-remembering some Spanish rice I'd eaten on some occasion, but this was definitely not it. I sauteed more badly-diced onion and tomato in some more olive oil. The heat must have been too high, because the onion was too browned. But the worst problem was a surfeit of white pepper. I've never had a problem with too much black pepper, but too much white pepper is particularly unpalatable. Someone should muzzle my right hand.

My husband, God bless him, ate it all.