Category: cookbooks gone wrong

I will let my friend Mary Kate tell this story:

This is what happens when you try to make delicious Mediterranean food in a tiny town in the Midwest, with not the best selection of products. After not really cooking for a few months.

First, you see a beautiful recipe with lentils. Then you can’t find the lentils mentioned, and end up with the lentils you can find at the Kroger. You cook, starting to feel trepidation. The lentils do not look like the picture, but hey, there’s still a bunch of steps.

So you persevere. Then you take the eggplant out of the broiler, where they said to put it for an hour. It is glowing. This is not good. Still, you’re not eating the outside. You put in the last of the veg to bake. Luckily the eggplant’s insides look better than its outsides. A minor mishap has you put more red wine vinegar in the lentil mush rather than the eggplant, but you recover. You persevere.

The carrots. Will not. Cook. Note, this was supposed to take an hour and is now well on its way to two. You finally say, whatever! And decide they are done. You’d put the lentil/mush into the oven to keep it warm for a minute, but had just taken it out. A slew of expletives later, you realize you left the fork in them in the oven too. (Burn still hurts four hours later).

You assemble veggie’d mush, plop some eggplant on top, and finish with a dollop/pool of creme fraiche.

By some miracle the result is delicious, but clearly perfect for food gone wrong.

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