Why I Stopped Cooking: Food Disaster

I know, it has been way too long since I last wrote of my cooking adventures. What happened was, I cooked a couple dishes and forgot to write about them. As the days passed I thought, I have to update my blog! I'm becoming a slacker!, but I never did write. The more I cooked, the less I could remember the particulars of cooking each dish, who ate them, and their reactions, and the less I felt I could write about them. Frustrated with my lack of drive to write, waning self-discipline, and fearing I was in the early stages of alzheimers, I told myself I had to cook something SO good that I would have to write about it immediately. It had to be something memorable for my tastebuds. So I picked the Julia Child classic, Beef Bourguignon. Readers: DO NOT underestimate this recipe. It is difficult. If you want to cook it, you will chop. You will chop until your hand hurts. You will think you are done chopping, only to realize you've just begun. And the cooking the ingredients seperately, then cooking them together. Cooking on the stove, then in the oven. Here is where disaster happened. Remember, my parents had recently bought a shiny new set of cookware, which I used during this recipe. Six hours into the recipe - yes, SIX hours - I was using a large, deep, oven safe Emril fry pan with a glass, oven safe-to-350degrees lid. I put the wonderfully aromatic Beef Bourguignon into the oven at 300 degrees, turned around to prepare another part of the meal, and BOOM! I dreaded turning around to see what horrible thing had happened in the oven. I turned around, opened the oven, and saw that the glass lid had shattered into thousands of pieces. At this point, I colapsed to the floor, and began crying and laughing at the same time. This is the only time in my life I have actually done both simultaneously. I crawled towards the living room, where poor little oblivious David had been sitting patiently waiting for dinner for several hours. "It's done!" I wimpered. "It's done, it's done, it's done. HAH! HAAH!" Maybe he thought I was serious for a moment, and that the dish was indeed finally done, because his face lit up for a moment, but when he followed me back into the kitchen, he beheld the doom that had befallen. We tried lifting the lid off the pan without getting glass into the stew, but it was impossible. Six hours of cooking: gone. $50- worth of red wine, beef, and vegetables: gone. My will to cook and write about cooking: gone. On the other hand, the memory of the exploding Beef Bourguignon: priceless.



Needless to say, I stopped cooking for a couple months and my parents bought new, better cookware. Now my best friend Elizabeth is here and will be returning to college soon, and she wants to cook something French. How about Beef Bourguignon?



To be continued.