The Dreaded Cooking Curse

That title has a nice "Halloween" vibe, right?

Ok, so I'm writing this blog post in lieu of swearing and throwing a baking dish across the room, and since it's a glass baking dish full of bubbling fruity goo, that's a very good thing.

I was planning on going to a Relief Society event tonight.  We're supposed to bring some sort of homemade (they specified) holiday treat or dessert.  Now I needed something low stress and that didn't take an extra trip to the grocery store so I decided to make the fruit cobbler I talked about a few posts ago.  I've made it successfully twice in a row, even with tweaking the ingredients, and both times it came out yummy.  Perfect, I thought, I'll do that.

Yeah, this is where the curse comes in.  It doesn't matter how good I am at cooking for just Tracy and I, or how many times I make a dish, if I make it for an event or for someone else 99 percent of the time it goes awry.  Okay, so I'm exaggerating, but not by much, it's more like 75 percent of the time. The first time I was determined to make Tracy an actual cute frosted birthday cake - wind smashes the plastic wrap down which then proceeds to rip off all of the icing. Taking my tried and true pasta salad to a big Fourth of July picnic --- ranch mix is too strong and runny.  Making my chicken alfredo stuff that Tracy loves for company --- white sauce turns an unappealing brown.  

Sometimes I don't even know what goes wrong, other times I make some small but crucial mistake.  Today in the midst of a sudden decision to the clean the bathroom (Why?  Why did I think that was a good idea?) and a desperate attempt to finish up my dissertation chapter (which still isn't quite there) I quickly, but I thought carefully, made the recipe --- and forgot the baking powder. (Note: this is an edit, I originally wrote baking soda which would have been an even bigger disaster, if that's possible.)

I am resisting the urge to swear.  I am resisting the urge to swear.