God, I hate Cooking!

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Today was a perfect example of why I should not ever enter the kitchen with the intent to cook a meal. 

Mid-morning, I whipped out my handy-dandy bread machine recipe book and decided to try to make French bread. I gathered all the ingredients and poured them into the machine, turned it on and walked away, thinking that I had just made the easiest bread ever.  Ten minutes later, I go to look at the progress of the bread and notice that the rotating hand inside the machine which is supposed to be mixing up the dough is not moving.  I call to my husband with an SOS.  We tried everything, but couldn’t figure out what was wrong.  So, I poured the bread dough, which wasn’t actually dough yet, into another bowl and tried to get it to form into the right consistency.  It was a disaster.  I finally got mad and threw the dough back in the bowl and stomped out of the kitchen.  During my tirade, my husband had decided he would  disassemble the bread machine to see what the problem was.  After tinkering with the machine a bit he discovered a belt had come off and that was why the machine wasn’t working.  He diligently worked on getting the belt into place, which wasn’t easy as the belt was very stiff, but he finally got it back into place.  Yeah husband!  At this point my dough that wasn’t really dough yet had been sitting out for about 30 minutes, but, unwilling to throw it away, we decided to put it back in the machine and see what happened.  The machine timer started and dough was on its way to finally actually becoming dough.  Entire time for bread would be three hours.

During the afternoon, my husband and I started to prepare Kabab Hala, which is basically steak, cut into thin strips and fried in a skillet with onions, garlic, tomato sauce and lots of spices, which is served over white rice.  After my husband cut up the meat, he handed it over to me to add spices and start cooking.   I started adding the spices I like.  I noticed I was out of black pepper in the shaker, so I searched out another container in the spice cabinet.  Unfortunately, the ignorant people who designed that particular spice receptacle, made the holes way to big.  Knowing my luck with cooking, I wasn’t about to try to sprinkle any on the meat from that container, so I poured some in my hand, pinched some and sprinkled it that way.  Once that task was done I moved on to opening the tomato sauce.  I was about to pour the tomato sauce into the skillet when I had a nose itch.  Forgetting that I just had black pepper in my hand, I rubbed my hand across the top of my nose and face.  Instantly, my left eye started to burn and tear up.  I had gotten  black pepper in my eye. I yelled for my husband and he came running in to take over on the meat, so I could wash out my eye. 

While I was recovering from the incident with my eye, the timer on the french bread went off.  I opened the bread machine and dumped the bread upside down and out of the cooking pan.  Judging from the look of it, I had just managed to cook the hardest bread ever.  I mean you could have really hurt someone if you had thrown it at them.  I just stood there staring in disgust.  My husband, trying to save the situation says, let me cut it and see what it tastes like.  He saws through the loaf and takes a bite.  “Um, it’s really good, honey,'” he says with a mouth full of bread.  I can tell from his expression that he is lying.  I just squinted my eyes at him and shook my head.

“I know it sucks, but thanks for trying to make me feel better,” I said.

“You have the worst of luck when it comes to cooking,” he replied.

I am the only person I know that can follow a recipe to a “T” and still have it turn out crappy.  “God I hate cooking!”