Sometimes The Meal Is So Bad You Just Have to Ditch It.

Have you ever made a meal that turned out so bad that you just wanted to feed it to the regurgitator in the sink? Or perhaps it turned out so bad that you even hesitated to do even that lest you invite a problematic visit from SPCP (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Plumbing).

I did.

Except it wasn’t a meal that I created in my kitchen. It was one I created on my laptop.

To be more specific, it was a recent blog post.

I wrote it during one dreadfully long sleepless night (I have those quarterly for no apparent reason). When I dotted the last “i” and crossed the last “t” at 5 am it seemed pretty clever and funny. I should’ve known better. I’ve had long sleepless nights before and even doorknobs seem clever and funny at 5 am.

So I sent it along to my editor the next day. Even she had some reservations about it. Of course, I didn’t pick up on it since I’d been up for nearly 48 hours straight (a point when the dog’s water dish seemed to take on a hilarious character of its own).

She made a couple of half-hearted suggestions and after a few tweaks I published it.

That was a mistake.

If you cook, you know how it is. If a dish does not come out quite right you can often improve it with a little tweaking: a pinch of salt, a dash of this or that, a splash of lemon juice or wine, maybe some crushed garlic…

But some dishes come out so terribly bad we over-tweak it, then tweak it some more: a fistful of salt, a glob of hot sauce, ladles of gravy, more salt, more hot sauce, more gravy…until it barely resembles the initial dish and hasn’t improved one iota.

So yeah, like an entree gone terribly wrong I thought I could improve my post through some mega-tweaking.

I regretted it. After all my tweaking this post still sucked eggs. So I took it down and consigned it to the regurgitator of the ethernet.

But all is not lost, in my next blog post I will offer several cooking tweaks that actually work. I hope you’ll never have to put them into practice, but if you do, you’ll have them.

Now if you’ll excuse me, the lamp in the corner has some new one-liners it wants to try out on me.

Bon Appetit!