A few months ago I gave up cooking “real” dinner during the week. My days are long, and cooking every night became time consuming and stressful because I love to cook, and I love to cook complicated/messy/involved/time consuming things. So now during the week I eat scrambled eggs, or a baked sweet potato or Annie’s mac and cheese with peas mixed in for dinner. All of this to say, that I now cook awesome dinners on the weekends. Things like Mediterranean turkey burgers, turkey and romaine salad with avocado dressing, no mayo potato salad, lemony chicken orzo salad and Parmesan zucchini sticks to name a few. And I rock dinner. My boyfriend and I both love good food and as it turns out, I make really good food. Usually.

This past weekend I experienced Dinner Fail, though. Twice. Both Saturday and Sunday dinners didn’t do it for me. I started with something that seemed like it would work out well enough for dinner Saturday night and leftovers that would be great for lunch on Sunday. Pesto chicken salad, easy enough. This was a Real Simple recipe so the hardest part was getting the meat off the bird. I paired it with spinach wraps and arugula, and some boiled finger potatoes. Sounds great, right? Well, I didn’t like it. And I can’t understand why. I love pesto. Pesto is my friend. Except that it would appear that Pesto and I are taking a break. It just didn’t taste good to me. My boyfriend thought it was great. In fact, he ate it for the next three days because I refused to go near it.

For dinner on Sunday I was decidedly ambitious. I pulled out my New York Times Cookbook and found a recipe for fresh corn skillet cakes with chives and Parmesan. Awesome, I thought to myself. I’ll make corn pancakes, and a summer squash salad and I’ll use the produce I got at the farmers market and it will be Amazing. Alas, I did not read the recipe closely enough and the corn skillet cakes were less cakes than fresh corn off the cob (four ears worth) held loosely together by one egg and a half cup of flour. When I say loosely, I mean not really at all. As soon as they hit the pan they started falling apart. I don’t want to talk about the flipping. And the salad. The salad wasn’t great, either. Not enough summer squash for the amount of dressing. I was thoroughly dissatisfied. We ate the salad anyway. We also ended up with a plate full of lightly browned corn mixed with some chives and Parmesan. They were no cakes. But the corn tasted good. So good that my boyfriend ate enough of it to give himself a nice stomach ache. I didn’t eat that much. I was too disgusted by two consecutive nights of Dinner Fail. I love food, and I love cooking, and when I cook food that isn’t good, it takes away twice as much pleasure for me. I hate to say it, but I pouted.

I have since decided that I need to take pictures of my cooking process and the final products in case they provide more hilarity and fodder for Alphabetic Fate. I also discovered this fantastic website www.gojee.com. Great recipes, gorgeous photos and the best part is a way to filter recipes by ingredients you don’t want to use. For example, if someone can’t eat tomatoes, ahem, I can pull all recipes without tomatoes. Pretty awesome. I think I’ll be trying this out for dinner this weekend. We’ll see how it goes.