Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Crock pot saga

Ever get to the point when you know you’re beating yourself up over something – and it’s such a minor thing that you KNOW you should not?

Monday evening I took a roast out of the freezer and placed it into the fridge to thaw. Tuesday evening I took it out to cook. I heated up some Olive Oil in a pan and seared all four sides of the roast (Ron likes the outside browned and seared; says you can’t get this in the crock pot). Added my seasonings and let it cook a bit longer. Took the meat and oil from the frying pan and placed it into a large stock pot. I covered this with water and chicken broth, and added some more seasonings. I let this boil for about an hour and then put the whole thing into the crock pot.

You’d think that would be the end of this story – right? Nope, this is just where the story really begins.

My crock pot is old and the knob is broken off. I have to use a pair of pliers to turn it off and on and I have to count the number of clicks between the off and highest setting to know where the temperature is set. Someone – not mentioning any names because it was probably me – didn’t turn the pot off after the last use so when I plugged it in, it heated up. I wasn’t ready for it to heat up at that point; I was merely getting it ready to receive the goods. I couldn’t find a pair of pliers so I unplugged the cord. (Can you see where this is leading?)

Once I was ready for the roast and the now wonderful smelling stock, I poured it all into the crock pot and went in search of something to turn what is left of the knob back on. I finally found something that would work as good as my pliers had and turned the pot back on. By now, it’s bedtime so I turned out the lights and went to bed. At about 11:00 pm I thought I should probably get up and check the roast but then decided that I knew it had enough water on it and I’d not turned it to high, so it should cook without any problems all night.

Since we close our door at night, and I slept really soundly last night, I didn’t realize it wasn’t cooking until this morning. I started to add the potatoes and carrots and realized the stock still looked the same as last night. Touched the lid and realized I had forgotten to plug the darn pot back in. It’s no one’s fault but my own and I beat myself up over things way more than I beat other people over things. It wasn’t that expensive in the grand scheme of things (I had gotten it on sale for $6 – about ½ price) but totally messed up my plans for dinner to be done when I got home. Ron has praise team practice tonight and I knew I'd be late getting home, so dinner “done” would have been nice. Jenny is going to fix something but instead of a $6 plus veggies dinner, it will be a $12 plus veggies dinner. Ugh!

I was so upset over that darn roast that I was pretty much in tears over it. Hmmm… probably not really the roast that’s the problem. Maybe it’s everything else and then the roast was the finishing straw.

2 comments:

Humayraa said...

Oh you poor thing! If it was me, I'd have just plugged it in before heading to work, and would still be having the planned menu for dinner.

What's Jenny making?

Teresa said...

She ordered from a local Chinese restaurant. They offer delivery so that was nice since she had no vehicle.

Wish I could say monday's fiasco was the first time I've done that but it's not. I've done it once and Amy's done it once but those were with a different crock pot. On that one, the plug doesn't seat correctly and you have to be just so-so or it doesn't turn on.

So basically, I have two pieces of dog-dung excuses for crock pots.