Who doesn’t love salty glue pasta sauce?

So, it happened. I knew it would. I accomplished something new on the list, but it was not nearly good enough to share here. Not that it was my fault, no no.

You see: A few days ago I picked one of our cookbooks off the shelf – one that had me skeptical to begin with, seeing as 1) the title consists only of the name of a food item, followed by “the 100 best recipes,” 2) the publisher is a large bookstore chain, and 3) the only two words about the author in the entire book are her first and last name, which you see only on the cover (not even in the copyright information). You know the kind of cookbook I’m talking about – the large, glossy things that breed in clearance racks under the fluorescent lights of chain bookstores.

But I knew I had to give it a chance (for the Food List’s sake, at least), so a few days ago I paged through it and picked out a half-dozen or so recipes that actually looked pretty good, including the one I made for dinner tonight.

And that’s where things went wrong. So what was it? Was it the recipe? We’ve likely all made some recipe that leaves you thinking – wait, that’s it? Really? This couldn’t have possibly been what they intended. Because this tastes kind of like inconsistently cooked vegetables and pasta covered with salty glue, and no one writes a recipe thinking “you know what I want to make? Inconsistently cooked vegetables and pasta covered with salty glue.”

So maybe it wasn’t quite that bad, but I just finished a small bowl and have no desire for seconds – might be the first time that’s happened in the history of the world. Definitely nothing I’d want to make again, nor would I want you to make it, so there’s no way I’m sharing the recipe here. But I’m still marking it off on the List, and I won’t quite yet throw the book out – I’ll give it another go at some point. Maybe.

Duds happen to the best of us, I suppose. I think I’ll recover with some leftover chocolate cake and a serving of the orange-cardamom ice cream I made today. An evening redeemed, indeed.