Recipe for Disaster

I enjoy cooking. Much of the time I'm reasonably good at it. There are few things more satisfying than calling the rest of the family to the dinner table after working hard to prepare the evening meal.

And there are few things more humiliating than realizing that I skipped an important part of the instructions in the recipe, which screwed things up pretty badly, such as I accomplished last night.

My deal with Mrs. Smoot is that I'm always happy to cook dinner so long as she tells me what she wants me to make, and I don't have to dream something up on my own. So last night I was instructed to make "Hearty Chicken & Noodle Casserole," a concoction dreamed up by the fine folks at the Campbell's Soup compound, and conveniently magnetized to our refrigerator door so I could find it.

I gathered all the ingredients, combined them into the specified kind of dish, and tossed 'er into the oven. I'm confident that I even got the oven temperature and timing set correctly: 25 minutes at 400 degrees. No sweat. It even looked quite good as I got it out of the oven and put it on the table.

Mrs. Smoot came to the table and immediately looked at it with suspicion. Granted, she does this even if I'm cooking something that can't possibly be screwed up, like Froot Loops. But she immediately took her fork and stabbed a load of it without even spooning any onto her plate. Then she gave me The Look, which indicated that the next words out of her mouth weren't going to be complimentary.

"Did you cook the noodles first...?" she asked after crunching away at a bite. "Uhhhhhhhh..." was my witty response.

They should really put directions like that in bold print in the recipe, for those of us who prefer to just skim the instructions for the important stuff. But no, it's written in tiny little letters, easily overlooked by people with my particular stage of dementia.

Well, Mrs. Smoot came to the rescue, adding some other ingredients to the mix, and tossing it into the microwave for a bit. Tomorrow night, I'm thinkin' Froot Loops.