Eh.

And then there are the days when you cook and cook and finally sit down to what should be a glorious dinner and say, “Eh.”

This happened yesterday. I had big cooking plans for my Sunday afternoon, as I often do. I try to cook a lot over the weekend—a goal that I have long aspired to but only recently achieved. Now that I have a toddler, it has become a necessity. Many days there simply isn’t time to cook between when we get home from work and daycare and when Little Z needs to fill her small but growing belly. A stash of leftovers is imperative.

Plus, Nick and I are exploring frugality—the daring concept of trying to actually live within our means, whatever those means might be. Grocery trips and meals are carefully planned, and we are no longer ordering Thai just because we don’t feel like cooking. I’m good with this—but I do miss the safety net of, “well, if it doesn’t turn out we can always order a pizza.”

Last night I think I would have ordered a pizza.

It wasn’t terrible, I should clarify. But it was, somehow, a lot of work for not much payoff, which is depressing. Cooking is like this sometimes, but it never fails to get me down when all those tearfully chopped onions end up meaning so little.

The original plan was too ambitious. We had leftover turkey and a turkey carcass from the fabulous bird Nick roasted for Friday night’s dinner party. Obviously, that needed to become turkey stock and turkey pot pie. After making a huge dish of stuffing to accompany said turkey, we were also out of my homemade sourdough bread, so I needed to make up another batch—a low-activity but nonetheless all-day process that results, ideally, in three loaves, two of which go in the freezer for future consumption. I love a well-stocked freezer. And then Sunday is a big slow cooker day for me—I love to get something in the slow cooker and magically have a meal ready at the end of the day, so I grabbed a package of chicken thighs out of the freezer and dropped them in along with some doctored store bought BBQ sauce. This works great for ribs, and I figured it would be good for chicken as well. I wanted collard greens to go with the chicken, but our car was iced in and the local store didn’t have them, so I bought a cabbage instead. And realized that I finally had the time to make a braised cabbage recipe that I’d read was the greatest cabbage ever (but took 2.5 hours in the oven).

To summarize, I intended to make 3 loaves of bread, turkey pot pie, turkey stock, bbq chicken, and braised cabbage.

I did all of it except the pot pie. And then I wondered why I was tired at the end of the day.

Here’s what happened:

• Bread: I ran out of regular flour, subbed in white wheat flour instead, had to add an unspecified extra amount of water, and the bread came out overly dense. I think. I haven’t yet cut into a loaf, but I can tell. Plus there was a snafu with the oven (automatic shutoff timer bullshit), and the final loaf ended up underdone—no knowing if it’s salvageable or not.
• Pot Pie: Chopped the turkey, then had the good sense to put this project on hold. I cling to the hope of its deliciousness in the future.
• BBQ chicken: I hadn’t done frozen chicken thighs in the slow cooker before, and accidentally overcooked them. They’re dry instead of tender. And not very flavorful. Oh well.
• Braised cabbage: Not, in fact, the most delicious cabbage in the world. Fine, but not awesome. High expectations led to disappointment.
• Stock: Actually totally delicious: rich and flavorful. The one pure victory – but I wasn’t eating it for dinner last night, so it didn’t really register as such when I was picking through my disappointing plate.

Eh. Sometimes it happens. You cook and you cook and you don’t quite fail, but you don’t succeed either. I can suffer from hubris, now and again, in regards to my cooking. I think I’m a pretty good cook. Then once in a while, I make a meal like this, and I remember that anyone can fail, at any moment.

Not the most elevating of revelations, plus I’m eating dry chicken and leftover braised cabbage for lunch today.

Oh well. There’s still that pot pie coming down the pike.