Oh where to begin?  I’ve had a few lately.  I’ve lost my touch with cooking fried eggs, so I keep creating messy piles of egg — I’m not sure if I need a new pan or a new method.  I tried to bake a cut up chicken in BBQ sauce in the oven, and I think I used too much sauce and should have grilled it at the end.  It lacked the flavor and crunch from the caramelizing of the sugars on the grill and tasted sort of soggy and bland.  And, probably my biggest learning curve lately has been using gluten-free products.  Anthony and I decided to try eating gluten-free six weeks ago, so I’ve been trying brown rice pastas (they clump easily) and gluten-free tortillas (they can be brittle).    Luckily most food is forgiving, and I enjoy the adventure of trying new ingredients and new recipes.  Bon Appetite!

I haven’t attempted any adventurous cooking lately, so that keeps the food bombs down to a minimum right now.  I did have a recent batch of black beans go wrong, though.  Thankfully it didn’t come at a horrible time (thanks to those cans of black beans I keep in the pantry just in case!), but it is one that still bugs me, especially since I wrote an entire post on cooking beans! I had pre-soaked the beans overnight in plenty of water and began cooking them the next morning.  Eight hours of simmering later (8 hours!) I still had crunchy, chalky beans on my hands.  Now, either the beans were so old that there was no saving them, or I made a misstep somewhere.  Still not sure — where is a food scientist when you need one?  This certainly won’t stop me from making beans again, but if they bomb again, expect a post on how to deal with unsuccessfully cooked beans.