Sunday reflections 10/9/2011

We all make cooking mistakes don't we?  One of my worst happened in our first years of marriage, I decided I needed to try some new recipes.  One day, while making a sandwich or something, I saw a recipe on the back of my mayonaisse bottle for some chicken burritos.  Some common sense warning bell should have gone off in my head at that moment.  I mean, the recipe was on the back of a mayonaisse jar...and it wasn't for waldorff salad (which I don't like, by the way) it was for burritos...burritos and mayonaisse don't mix.  Have you ever been to a mexican resaurant where they have served you mayonaisse burritos?  However, like I said, no warning alarm went off and I decided to give the recipe a try....Brad, still to this day (and we've been married 13 years now), teases me about the time I made him mayonaisse burritos where I got the recipe off the back of the mayonaisse jar. 

I've matured some since then.  I get my new recipes off blogs now...like recipes.com where they tell you how many people have tried the recipe and what they have rated the recipes...four stars or higher only.  One of the blogs I've been getting a lot of recipes from the last few months is The Pioneer Woman's blog.  A lot of the recipes have been great.  I've had a few that I don't really like...more of a preference thing than a bad recipe.  So I decided to try another from her blog...Tandori Chicken...not one of the Pioneer Woman's personal recipes, but one that had won an award from her this summer.  It is recommended that you grill this chicken, but as it was only 50 degrees out Friday, I decided to cook it in a grill pan inside.  As I was purchasing the curry seasoning for the marinade of this chicken a brief warning bell did go off inside my head.  It went something like this...curry...Indian food...I don't like Indian food.  The warning bell did not sound loudly enough though, so the curry went in my shopping cart and into the marinade Thursday night.  Upon cooking the chicken on Friday, the smells that filled my kitchen were ominous.  The chicken was not going to be what I liked, what my children liked or what my husband liked.  Before my tandori chicken became as famous as my mayonaisse burritos, the chicken went down the drain.  The day was saved with some Costco chicken nuggets.  While not your fine cuisine, these nuggets were a homerun after the smell of the cooking had everyone sweating bullets that Mom was actually going to make them eat the curry chicken she had cooked that night. 

Yesterday, this is what I woke up to outside my bedroom window:

And this is what I saw when I looked out my front window:

I don't know that I've ever seen a snow fall this early.  Last weekend it was 80 degrees and I got sunburned at Jordan's football game, yesterday 4-6 inches of snow.  Of course, by the evening most of it had melted off leaving a mucky muddy mess at my house and giving me a sneak preview of the mess I will fight in the winter.  We had our first discussion of:  when you come in the house with your snow clothes on you will only enter in this door, your clothes will come off and be hung up here, your boots will come off and be put away here.  Today our highs are in the 50s giving me hope that I still have some nice fall weather to look forward to.