another dinner disaster!

I offered to make my neighbor dinner last night as a test run for a larger neighborhood dinner. In fact, I had 5 recipes for each day of the week and was planning a new and exciting dish for every night with the idea that I could give my two neighbors some of the dinners and maybe they would cook something for me next week.

The recipe was from a famous french restaurant, and was for red wine chicken. Who doesn't love red wine? And aren't the french supposed to have great food? The recipe looked easy, just make the marinade, marinate the chicken, chop some vegetables up, and cook. I also found a recipe which CLAIMED to be easy to mix, no fail, slow cooker baked apple butter rolls. I found that on a blog written by a woman who claims she can't cook and she posts recipes she can cook. With pictures as proof that the recipe turned out.

Immediately I was a little worried when the marinade, which the chicken had to sit in for 24 hours, smelled, well, weird. In retrospect, chicken and red wine don't seem to be a great mix. And the recipe called for potatoes, but it only mentioned pre-cooking them for 2 minutes before adding them in with the chicken.  That seemed strange because potatoes take forever to cook.

at least the vegetables LOOKED good

Here's what the chicken looked like pre-cooked. I didn't bother to take a cooked pic because it looked basically the same, only more beige. Under those chicken thighs are 6 carrots, 3 onions, and 18 ounces of baby potatoes which I cubed even though the recipe didn't suggest that. As it cooked a mild vinegar smell permeated the kitchen. I should have known that was not a good sign:

why do most chicken recipes look like botched abortions?

The chicken was SUPPOSED to cook for 45 minutes. It ended up taking 1:15 minutes to cook through. The potatoes? Pretty much as raw coming out as they were going into the oven and they were inedible (I learned on NPR this weekend that raw potatoes can kill people - same is true of raw beans - it was a TED talk about how cooking aided evolution - surprised my ancestors survived, but that could explain why I eat a lot of salad). The carrots were good but also not really cooked. The chicken was okay where the marinade hadn't soaked into the meat.

As for those fucking apple butter no fail so easy to make a moron could do it rolls?

the dough smelled good but looked like petrified poop

and I will never again trust a recipe that gives the cook time as "60 - 90 minutes" - are you fucking kidding? a 30 minute difference????? also, instead of filling my house with the smell of baking rolls my house smelled like burning paper from the parchment paper I had to put in the slow cooker

we tried, but we couldn't taste the rolls, they were too hard to bite into - I've been throwing them at the asshole squirrel who is eating my lawn furniture

So, basically my neighbor asked that I never, ever, ever, EVER cook EVER again. I'm not sure what went wrong but even my neighbor's cat wouldn't touch the chicken parts that had marinade on them. They went home and ordered pizza, which I know because I saw the delivery guy.

Sigh. I swear I exactly followed the recipes. I'm trying to not give up on cooking. But I think I'm genetically programmed to just eat out all the time. Side note, an anecdote my aunt told me at thanksgiving: my grandmother (on my dad's side) told my grandfather she couldn't cook. And he said "but you can read, can't you?" and handed her some cookbooks. After a week of eating her food he became the cook for the family