Disappointment

Can we talk about dinner? Or maybe, I'd rather not.

We made scallops for dinner. We purchased them this past weekend (Sunday, I think), and although Buppy sealed them with our vacuum sealer, he didn't seal them all the way as they were very juicy and we weren't sure when we'd be eating them. Mistake #1, but not Buppy's fault. My bright idea when I came home from work was to dip the scallops in an egg wash, then into bread crumbs mixed with Parmesan cheese. We placed them on a broiler pan, sprayed them with cooking spray to brown, baked at 400F for 10 minutes, rotated the pan (our darn oven bakes unevenly), then baked for another 8 minutes. To finish them off, I broiled them for another 2 minutes or so to *hopefully* brown and crisp up the outsides. We decided to eat some of our leftover Asian noodles with them; while not a great flavor combo, the noodles needed to be eaten and there were lots left. I hate wasting food and try to avoid it if at all possible. Most of the time we're really good about this as Buppy is really great about taking in leftovers for meals at work (since he works 48 hours at a time).

Dinner was . . . . a fail. Perhaps not what I'd call an epic fail, but a fail nonetheless. To be honest, my stomach is rather upset as I type this. Buppy only had one scallop that was a little fishy, so while I don't think they'd gone bad, my idea as far as how to prepare them was flawed. How? I haven't figured it out yet. It sounded so good in theory. But there obviously was a big difference between my 'in theory' and 'in practice'. I thought breaded and baked would be good, but somehow it just went wrong. Something was very, very salty in the breading. I know Parmesan cheese is known to be salty, but this was just overwhelming. Ick. And the bread crumbs had a strange taste to me, like they were old, but I don't think they were. They weren't brand new, but we've used that canister fairly recently. I guess it was a combination of things, but whatever the case, it wasn't good.

I don't often fail at cooking. Not to say that things always turn out as I plan, just that I'm not often disappointed with what we make, even if it's not quite as I'd imagined. This is one of those times where I can definitely say that I'm disappointed in how our meal turned out. But oh well, that's part of the learning curve of cooking, isn't it? You cook, you learn, then you cook some more. I just hope I feel better for the chili cook-off tomorrow!