Not Fit for Human Consumption

Yuck!

Y'know, I get tired of cooking the stuff that I cook...the recipe I have for winter stew, for instance, involves cooking beef shanks and boiling bones and doing port wine reductions and Heaven knows what else. This sounds like too much trouble for a stew, so I go out on the internet and find a nice crock pot recipe, which says to cook the stew on low for something like 10 hours. Good and fine. By four hours, the stew is smelling ok. By eight hours it not only smells questionable, but the meat has turned into a new kind of tasteless, sugarless gum. This is when I wrinkle my nose, unplug the crock pot and head to the store for hot dogs.

I keep forgetting what most recipes in the world are like. Most of them are at least a moderate amount of effort (cutting and peeling all the vegetables, plus assembling) for well below-average results. Who wants to cook when this is what you turn out? I keep thinking that I'm a bad cook, but then I end up at something like a church pot-luck where most of the things there are just awful...and you KNOW the things that these people brought to the pot-luck are their top-notch, no-fail recipes. What are most people eating? Do they really consume these giant vats of Midwest Mush, or do they mainly go out to eat, and this is their once or twice-a-year culinary contribution? Ew. Double ew.

I hereby invite anyone tired of wasting effort on bad recipes to click on the logo below and give it a try.



I'll let you know how my beef shanks turn out.