Disappointing dinners

Unrelated to dinners, we lost power yesterday morning at about 2 am and didn't come back on until 7 pm, so we had most of the day in the dark.  No tv or anything like that so it was pretty exciting and I made dinner by tea light (because we didn't have any real candles).

Saturday night, I made (from Campbell's 1-2-3 cookbook), the homestyle beef stew recipe, included carrots, potatoes, stew meat, thyme (I used basil and oregano because I didn't have any), bay leaves, beef broth and I think that's it.  You let it simmer for like an hour and a half and then add the carrots and potatoes, then another half hour.  It was not very good...well, in all honesty, we didn't eat it, it didn't smell delicious, so I put the lid on and pretended it didn't happen until today when I threw it away.  In lieu of the stew, hubby had egg noodles and butter and I had chicken pasta roni.

Tonight, Sunday, I made a recipe I found online.  With my newspaper subscription, I get it every day and am able to read some of the articles in it.  I found this article about this girl who did a year of slow cooking, and of course it intrigued me and I looked at recipes on her blog.  I also thought that maybe she might have the same taste buds as me, because her taste-o meter sounded kind of like mine might, she gave it 4 stars out of 5, so I hoped I would like it too.  I found one called Honey Garlic Chicken and all the ingredients sounded like it might be good.  Anyway, so we made that today and it wasn't very good.  The chicken was nice and tender and juicy, but the flavor of the sauce that was infused in the chicken too just rubbed me the wrong way.  And hubby at least tried it, but he didn't care for it either.  I was really disappointed because I was very hopeful.  Hubby said that on his mission (to Chile) there was someone that did their chicken in the slow cooker with milk and garlic, so we might try that sometime, also something with barbecue sauce would be good too.  I also thought that even just doing the chicken in water or whatever would make it good too.

So, I put most of the chicken that we didn't eat in 2 trash bags, along with the yucky stew and we pretended the whole thing didn't happen.  The "good" dinner consisted of country fried steak from the freezer and egg noodles with salt and pepper.  It was pretty good, obviously not awesome, but good nevertheless.

On the bright side, I made peanut butter candy cookies (Betty Crocker peanut butter cookie mix in a pouch) plus a bunch of candy.  Mostly sixlets, white chocolate chips and milk chocolate m&ms.  Hubby's crazy, it was his idea of course, but they turned out really good!