Blunders in the kitchen...

Not every meal that I cook is good enough to brag about. Some of them are just plain disappointing. Because this is a blog about cooking, I must share the bad with the good! There are two meals that I have cooked recently that were not up to par. Okay, one meal and one dish. I'm not very good at frying things. Rarely do I fry because it's not healthy.  But, it would be nice to fry things every once in awhile and it turn out perfect. I either don't have the oil hot enough and it gets soggy with grease or the oil is too hot and it gets too brown and crispy. I fried some tenderloins for hot tenderloin sandwiches the other night in my iron skillet. Aren't iron skillets suppose to have even heating? I had to turn the outsides toward the center on one side to insure an even browning. They took FOREVER to cook! I only had 6. This was a weeknight and I needed to cook them before they went bad. But honestly, I was too tired to spend that much time in the kitchen and my patience was wearing thin. I peeled potatoes and microwaved them for mashed potatoes. Cooked them for 20 minutes in some water and thought they were done. Start mixing them with a mixer and realized that they were not completely done. I decided to just add more milk and butter and mix those son-of-a-guns until they were smooth. Did I mention that the tenderloins were taking forever to brown? So, I cranked up the heat. This is when they got crispy so that a steak knife could hardly cut them. With hot tenderloin sandwiches, white country gravy is really the best. I had too much oil in my skillet and didn't want to mess with homemade gravy so I looked for packets of gravy that you just add water. I only had one packet of white country gravy. Dang! So, I decided to use brown gravy mix because I had more of them. The dinner was edible - not my best by any means. Actually, the tenderloins were better warmed up the next day in the microwave because they were softer.

My other goof-up was au gratin potatoes. I added too much milk to my potatoes and instead of being creamy, they were soupy. They tasted fine, but were not pretty! The cheese didn't melt like it was suppose to and just sat in globs in the milk. It's kind of funny now that I think of it. Maybe I better watch some more cooking shows!