Why I bake, not cook

There is a reason I do not volunteer to cook anything other than vegetarian chili, spaghetti sauce and burgers. Take yesterday, for example. Sarah prefers meals without red meat and following Simple Filling on the Weight Watchers' plan makes it easy for me to eat other protein sources than red meat. So, I'd spent some time going over recipes on the WW site and found one that looked good: a vegetarian stew. After the huge success of the veggie chili, I was pretty confident it would be a winner.

I gathered all the ingredients and followed the recipe pretty exactly, only making a few spicing changes. When we sat down to dinner, Sarah looked in the pot and asked, "You won't be mad at me if I don't like it, will you?" That should have been my first clue. She sampled it, and though it was very pretty-what with all the different bean and vegetable colors-it was more like cooked veggies thrown together than a stew. She said, "Maybe it needs a little more liquid, it's not really 'stewy"." So, I thought since we generally run pea soup through the blender to make it nice and rich, maybe running the stew through the blender would solve the problem.

First error: One does not have a lot of luck if the glass container is not thoroughly seated on the base. Next thing I knew, the glass container is twisting around, and little pieces of black plastic are flying around the kitchen. Not to be deterred, I made the second error: trying to use the food processor. The processor whipped that stew into a mush, and though similar to peas soup consistency, it definitely was not appetizing. I could get graphic, but suffice it to say use your imagination: green, orange, red and white vegetables mashed with red and white beans....

Thank goodness I do a mean turkey burger!

I have finally made a list of to-do projects that need to go up on the white board I saved from the discard pile at work. I have a few sewing projects and a few crochet projects. With luck, I can clear a decent amount of space from the stash area so I can refill it will new fabric. I'm getting bitten by that sewing bug again, and it feels good.