My Recipe for Mush

April 14, 2008

This is a story about a recipe gone wrong and an attempt to save it.

It all began on an innocent Friday afternoon. My girlfriend and I discussed our dinner options, finally settling on enchiladas and Mexican rice. I suggested we search Ben’s site, What’s Cooking? for our recipes, as the pictures of his food had been making me salivate for months. He had what we wanted, enchiladas verdes and Mexican rice.

We headed to the local Kroger, a bastion of discounted prices and limited produce. Naturally, they lacked fresh Tomatillos and we settled for that cheap can of Kroger red enchilada sauce - Sandra Lee would be proud. Recipe #1 fell not with a bang, but a whimper.

Tired of cheap cliches, we moved on, gathering the ingredients for our last hope, the rice. Little did we know that by the end of the night we would be wishing the store lacked the tomatoes, onion, or garlic for which we searched. We left the store naively confident in our ability.

I lightly fried the tortillas and preheated a pot with some vegetable oil for the rice while my girlfriend prepared the vegetables and rice sauce. I made my first blunder when I tipped the skillet with the extra tortilla oil into the pot for the rice - if a little oil is good, a little more is better, so my small brain reasoned.

My second mistake as far as I can tell was using an Asian sticky rice for this dish. My blogger’s arrogance won out.

“I’ve written two posts on rice. I know what I’m doing,” I mused.

I added the rice and stirred, coating each grain with a generous helping of oil. They fried slowly - probably too slowly - but I was none the wiser. We added the liquid, boiled, and simmered. The enchiladas came out of the oven, covered in melted cheese. We took our enchiladas and doled out what appeared to be cooked rice.

Our first bites of rice were filled with crunchiness. The rice was not close to cooked. Having returned it to the pot, we turned on the heat, and ate the enchiladas. By the time we finished the rice was still crunchy.

We added water and cooked. 9:00 pm? Crunchy.

10:00 pm? Crunchy.

11:00 pm? Crunchy, but it was starting to soften a little

We finally turned the heat off at 12:30 am. The rice wasn’t quite as crunchy, but the grains had burst and the rice was a grainy mush. Disheartened, we just left the rice on the stove, covered and went to bed.

The next morning we finally had the energy to put the rice away, unsure of whether it was worth keeping. It’s current state was bad, but we didn’t want to throw out all that food. The day rolled on and we were tasked with planning dinner. My girlfriend had the suggestion of adding some meat and vegetables to the rice in an attempt at rescuing it. I was skeptical and didn’t want to ruin even more food. Nevertheless, we went ahead with our plan, picking up a potato, onion and hot Italian sausage at the grocery store. Fat can make anything taste good.

We sauteed the sausage and then the vegetables in the sausage fat. It looked like a great meal in itself and my doubts resurfaced. How could we put something that looked so good into that mush? Still, we combined our creations…and ate.

It actually tasted pretty good. As long as I didn’t think of the rice as rice, I enjoyed it. Out fatty creation saved our pot of mush. Of course, my girlfriend still has about a pound and a half of that mush and sausage left - we’ll see if she can finish it.

Note: Realize that the mistakes were certainly mine and not the fault of Ben’s recipe. He knows what he’s doing and I am going to try the recipe - and follow it more closely - again in the future.

Posted in Failures |