October 24, 2006

Dinner from Hell

You know when you have one of those days? A day when everything you cook is a disaster? Like there is some malevolent, unseen force in the universe that entered your kitchen and put a curse on you?
Yesterday was that day.
And yesterday our good friends, the poor things, were invited to dinner.
I must say, they were very kind about the whole thing and we'll have fodder for dinner party conversation for years to come. "remember that night when you made the chicken that wouldn't cook and then I found, not one, but two strands of your hair in the apple crumble?"
It was horrific.
It started so innocently...I found an interesting chicken recipe online, got ingredients together for a nice salad, made my apple crumble and some savory mini cakes with roasted red pepper and gruyère cheese (the only thing that came out well).
Then it all fell to shit.
To start, I only had about 1/8th of a teaspoon of sherry vinegar for the salad and I really couldn't have used balsamic or red wine vinegar for this particular salad. Of course I didn't realize this until about 8 pm while trying to dress the salad. I improvised with apple cider vinegar but it just wasn't the same.
Then the chicken didn't cook! I removed it from our plates, put it all back in the pan and simmered it for another 15 minutes and it still didn't cook! This was after over an hour of simmering. I'm telling you, I was cursed!
Then my friend found a hair in her apple crumble. I immediately took the plate away and gave her another serving. After several bites, she found another hair.
Can you believe this???
Thank heavens they brought some delicious white wine and we opened a bottle of our favorite red so at least we had good wine. And good mini cakes.
Here's the recipe.

Ingredients:
130 g (1 cup) flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/8 cup gruyère
1 tsp salt
1 tsp cumin
freshly ground pepper
1 egg
1 plain yogurt (125 g ; 1/3 cup)
1 tbsp olive oil
1/2 cup minced roasted red peppers

Directions:
Heat oven to 180°C-350°F.
Put dry ingredients and wet ingredients in two separate bowls. Add peppers to egg mixture; pour over flour mixture and stir until dry ingredients are moistened.
Spoon into mini muffin pan and bake 15 min or until an inserted toothpick comes out dry.
Set aside to cool before unmolding.
Yields appr. 15 mini muffins Pin It

3 comments:

Katie said...

I learned a couple of weeks ago (the hard way) that my oven cannot cook 2 things at the same time. After an hour and a half the potatoes and broccoli in the gratin were still raw and my guests starving. I tried to explain that it was healthier....no one bought that idea...Next time I'll make your mini cakes first...

Susan in Italy said...

Whoa! That is some bad ju ju! Have you done anything mean to somebody recently? Maybe they're cursing you. ;) Recently, I tried making pumpkin ravioli and ended up with boiling water full of empty ravioli and all the filling swimming around in thew water.

Jennifer said...

Katie
why can't these things happen when we don't have dinner guests?!?

Susan
it was bad juju!