Like a diaper filled with Indian food...

After being married for a little over a year, I feel like we've truly expanded our culinary horizons. We cook almost every night of the week, we've perfected some classic recipes, and we try to cook something new at least twice a week. In order to keep up with recipes we like, we began keeping up a notebook where we write down recipes we particularly enjoyed and would like to cook again. Of course, sometimes we make a meal and it is OK, but not something we would ever necessarily make again (this often happens with Rachael Ray recipes -- very hit or miss). Really, in our year of culinary adventures we had never made anything that was truly inedible, until last night.

Typically on Sunday afternoon we decide what we're going to cook for the week, looking at the usual references: Jamie Oliver, America's Test Kitchens, Cooking Light, and the occasional Martha Stewart or Food Network dish. I then neurotically make a grocery list, rewrite said grocery list based on which items we need from each section of the grocery store, and then go to said store.

It started out just like any evening at the loft. Ross and I both got home around 4, played with the dogs and decompressed for about an hour, watched the recorded episode of Jeopardy! from the day, and then decided to start dinner. The choices were an orzo-stuffed chicken, a shrimp paella, and a parsley-nut pesto from ATK. Seeing that the pesto took only 15 minutes to make, we opted for that. It seemed simple enough, you mix toasted pecans, parmesan cheese, roasted garlic, olive oil, and parsley in a food processor and use the sauce to dress pasta. This process would definitely be aided by a quality food processor, which we do not possess.

See, when we made our wedding registry, we saw that instead of buying a food processor and a blender, you can get a combination where they share the same base to save on storage space. We thought to ourselves, "How brilliant! Why doesn't everyone have one of these?" and the answer is because it sucks. The blender part is fine, but the food processor first of all only holds 3 cups, which is barely enough to make a bowl of hummus, and second the blade often spins so slow that I could stick my hand in and twist the blade myself faster than the obscenely loud machine. So I put the ingredients in, turned it on, and the blade wouldn't budge. Ross suggested that I take some out- perhaps it was just overloaded, so I took half of the stuff out. Still no movement. Finally I took everything out and tried to run the processor with nothing in it at all -- yet still the blade moved so slow that if you dropped something in the bowl, you could reach down and fish it out without worrying about losing a finger. Finally, we gave up and just mixed it up in the blender.

Determined that, after all of this hard work, our dish would be amazing, we dressed the pasta and each took a bite. It was disgusting. Not disgusting like, "gee, this isn't very good, we shouldn't make this again", but disgusting like, we both spat it out and brushed our teeth immediately.

We didn't bother washing out the food processor, we threw it in the dumpster as we headed to Taco Bell for dinner and to Target to buy a new food processor. While it was disappointing to make a meal exactly per the directions and have it be nasty, it did make for a humorous story and a good lesson, never make America's Test Kitchen's Parsley Nut Pesto - it's seriously gross.

Of course, I am sickly drawn to gross things, so I took a few pictures:

We tried adding Paul Newman Caesar, Tony Chachere's, and red wine vinegar (the go-to flavor enhancers), but it still tasted terrible.
A shame that so much grossness had to go to waste - the dogs wouldn't even eat it.
A picture of the mixture in the blender - it sort of resembled baby poop. A total culinary failure.