Humble Pie

I believe it would be really disingenuous of me to share only my cooking triumphs with you, my loyal gastro-readers, and none of my spectacular, hilarious failures. Now I don't think it's presumptuous of me to say that I am an acceptable cook. Professionally trained? No. Master of the art of French (or any other nationality of) cooking? Absolutely not. Iron Chef? Far from it. But I'm no slouch here. 9 times out of 10 I produce something that the majority of people would be happy to eat. Really I do. But to present myself as a cook, and not to include any of my occasional kitchen disasters in the tapestry, like some kind of obnoxious Stepford-esque Martha Stewart clone? Totally not my style.

So in the spirit of that sentiment, I present to you, my epic failure on the VERY FIRST Gastro-Junkie challenge. Now to be fair...

I should have known the recipe was doomed from the start.

There were some clues. Now please note, it was no fault of the challenger. Lex provided me with an absolutely do-able challenge. Interesting, but far from impossible: Using shellfish as the featured ingredient, create a gluten free meal, utilizing some sort of "oh weird...but good!" sort of accent ingredient. Something that shouldn't work but does.

It took me about a day, but I ended up distilling my idea down to this--Pan seared scallops, served with a mango-lavender chutney (surprise!) and coconut-lime rice. It was summery, it had a totally unexpected floral element, and it was, in fact, gluten free, a fact I confirmed after doing a little research (ie. asking Lex) and finding out that rice, in it's un-messed with, non-instant form, is totally fine for those who are gluten intolerant. And I was only slightly put off when I discovered upon hitting the grocery store that the food grade lavender I had spied there last week was GONE. (Clue number 1.) But not just GONE. Spirited away, evaporated, and any memory of its very existence wiped from the memories of everyone who works there. No lavender for me.

No matter. I grabbed some mint instead, figuring that the cool mint would cut through the sweet mango and the buttery scallops to add some needed freshness, and went about my business. Now. Here's where everything went horribly wrong. At the advice of the friendly man at the seafood counter I turned the temperature on my refrigerator down in order to keep the scallops fresh overnight. So I shouldn't have been surprised when I took the poblano pepper I was planning on using in the chutney out of the refrigerator, and found that it was a poblano-sicle. Not the end of the world. I ran it under some water, cut it in half, and threw it on the grill to get a nice, smoky flavor out of it. No big thing. What WAS a big thing, was the fact that the mint flat-out-froze in my fridge, so it looked gorgeous and fresh when I pulled it out, and then wilted into disgusting seaweed green mush when I went to rinse it off. Oh, and my mangoes? I'd left them out on the counter to ripen, so they blessedly suffered no weird mango frostbite. But When I chopped them, instead of creating a nice, chunky salsa consistency, they disintegrated into uneven mushy goop. Yuck. Oh, and that poblano? Well it was fine, except for the fact that only after adding it to the mango did I realize that I hadn't bought nearly enough to balance the cloying sweetness of the dish, and now it was too late.

At this point I'm starting to get that feeling in the pit of my stomach that this simply isn't going to work out. But I don't give up. Not right away. Slimy,unusable, wilted mint, mushy mangoes. Fine. I am not excited about the flavors coming out of this bowl of stuff, not at all, and I'm thinking this might be an evening of Mr. Gastro nodding politely at me as he chews, trying not to give away his lack of enthusiasm, but I'm not giving up yet. I can still fix it. Maybe. But when I go to get the limes out of my fridge and find two hard, frozen, angry little green golf balls, It's the final straw. It's 9:15. This stuff doesn't taste very nice, and now it's not going to. I decide to take my own advice.

I ordered a pizza.

I dumped the soupy mess in the garbage, shut the kitchen door behind me without cleaning up, and I ordered a pizza. I'm actually waiting for it as we speak. Because it is entirely okay to mess up a meal every now and again. Especially if the reason is an over-abundance of ambition. It is not okay to eat something that you know is crap, and even less okay to serve it to someone else. Not when there are no-ones feelings to hurt but your own. I'm not discouraged, and I'm not giving up on this challenge (expect a re-match some time next week) but tonight, with a big laugh and an eye toward better meals in the future, I'm staying the hell out of the kitchen, because that was an absolute comedy of errors. Everything that could have gone wrong did, and so I ordered a pizza and shared the messy details with all of you, so that we could all laugh together.