I give!

I can see by all the comments to yesterday's post that you're dying to know about last week's Worst Dinner.

I was determined to not blog about it, but since it's important to you, I give.

It went something like this:

I was ironing and watching Rachel Ray.  As much as I like Rachel as a person, I generally don't care for her recipes.  I don't watch her show.  Since ironing is the Most Boring chore (dusting is Most Futile, laundry takes a close second) I do it only once quarterly and I always watch television to pass the time.  I'm sure I planned ironing for 9:00, so I could watch the very cool Kelly Ripa.  It's telling that I was still ironing at the end of Rachel's show (which featured the very cool Taylor Swift), when she whipped up a Tex Mex BBQ Turkey Tamale Pie.

Okay, so the name isn't all that appetizing.  Really, though, the filling was fabulous.  I think the whole thing had a fighting chance to be pretty darn good, if it weren't for,

A) my grave errors in judgment on the tamale part of the recipe, and
B) the fact that somewhere in the recesses of my brain, I decided that my famous (no, really) Mexican Canned Bean Soup should round out the meal.  For the record: that one tamale pie would have been gobbled up (theoretically) in an instant and I would have been left with four hungry men, staring at me like "So. What's for dinner?" and no hope for saving my life.

So A).  I didn't have polenta on hand, but I do keep a stockpile of those Jiffy boxes of cornbread.  I decided that two would suffice for the topping.  Unfortunately, instead of 2/3 cups milk, I added 1 2/3 cups milk to the batter...and then, even with the help of a resident math genius, couldn't figure out how to fix it.  It went downhill from there.

And B).  Because (round two of) two boxes of Jiffy cornbread were too much for my little pie plate, this happened:

 ...and even though the top looked like this...

...the middle looked like this:

So no big deal, right?  Just throw that sucker back in the oven and dig into the soup.  Which we did, topped with cheese and sour cream and full of yummy Mexican flavor goodness.  All was well with the world.

Even after the pie had to go back into the oven for a third time...

And a fourth.

And the top was charred, but the inside was fine and nobody was really all that hungry any longer but they know how attached I get to my little creations so they gamely held out their plates and we all took a bite and realized that

The only thing worse than chasing Mexican Canned Bean Soup with BBQ Tamale Pie is chasing Mexican Canned Bean Soup with really, really bad BBQ Tamale Pie.

And for only the second time in 8.5 years of wedded bliss, I threw it away. Nobody will remember the name, but "that pie thing" will go down in the annals of our family history along with The Lasagna from Hell.